Government Experience Manager, Apac

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive.

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

**How you’ll make an impact...**

As Xero’s APAC Government Experience (GX) Manager you will have a significant impact by influencing the government to deliver favourable public policy outcomes for Xero, our partners and our customers. You will be responsible for managing the state and federal policy process in Australia, and will support the APAC Head of GX with surge capacity across APAC as required.

You will be a highly valued member of a number of internal Xero teams. You will be a member of the: APAC GX team, global GX team, legal team and wider Xero team. These teams are high performing yet supportive, and you will be challenged to continually redefine best practice. Valuing the power of teamwork underpins Xero’s success. You will develop a broad network of internal and external stakeholders to inform your understanding and intuition of public sector issues in Australia. Your external network will be derived from: industry groups, spanning technology, accounting software and fintech stakeholders; government relationships, including relevant policy officer and regulator relationships; and others.

Crucially, your internal stakeholders will be formed from members of Xero's legal, communications, marketing, partnerships and product compliance teams. Your strategic stakeholder management prowess will provide you the building blocks for success. In collaboration with internal stakeholders, the APAC Head of GX and the GM of GX, you will contribute to the development of an APAC government plan. It will be your responsibility to identify, present and prioritise issues in Australia before designing a plan to manage these issues.

You will benefit from and build upon Xero’s positive reputation within government to deliver meaningful outcomes as per the government strategy. You will form part of a high performing team. Your success will be measured by the execution of the APAC government plan, and favourable, Xero-instigated policy outcomes within prioritised issue areas.

**What you will bring...**

Always first, second and third, you’ll be a kind, empathetic human being who cares about others, has a bias for action and is an outstanding communicator across all mediums.

You will bring public sector experience with a strong ability to drive cohesion, focus and outcomes across a diverse array of stakeholders.

It’s essential you have experience in public policy, which includes having an understanding of policy processes and how to navigate them to successfully exert influence. This experience could be from within government as a political or departmental policymaker, a regulator as a policy implementer or as a policy shaper/advocate from private sector, industry organisation or community sector. At a minimum you will have a deep understanding of each of these perspectives.

Preferably your public policy professional experience will also mean you’ll bring the skills developed from a period of work in areas of topical alignment to Xero’s strategic public policy concerns, namely small business policy, digital and digitalisation policy, data policy (including consumer directed data portability), innovation and fintech policy, taxation policy and broader economic/finance policies.

You’ll be a diplomat who is aware of the need for alignment and internal stakeholder involvement and collaboration as a critical component in policy formation in the modern corporate environment, both internally and externally to the organisation.

**What you’ll do...**

You lead in an aligned and collaborative way - you will need to lead multiple projects that entail working collaboratively and transparently with multiple Xero business units, in particular the legal, communications, partnerships and product compliance teams, to ensure unwavering business alignment. Building on all of the above, you’ll be an evangelist for beautiful technology and small business public policy, within the Legal team (in which we sit), within Xero, within our sector and more widely.

You will develop and maintain a sophisticated approach to the identification, segmentation and prioritisation of the major public policies impacting small businesses and Xero in Australia, including supporting the GM to report on public policy intelligence, trends and insights to senior management.

You will support and enable Xero’s policy decision