Over the past few years, small business accounting platform Xero has been working to accelerate the pace of its product and technology development, hire more tech industry veterans, rethink its values and aggressively expand to new markets. CEO Sukhinder Singh Cassidy explained this is no accident: It is all part of a larger strategy that she called “Winning on Purpose.”
“Winning for winning’s sake is not really what drives our company, it’s not really our culture. Our culture is more about winning for the customer. It’s also about living our purpose consistently, making it felt in the business. The purpose of Xero should be felt every day in the way we operate,” she said during the company’s annual Xerocon conference, held today in Nashville.
More than a slogan, it is a specific strategy that has come from the CEO—who was hired in 2022—after studying the company and its partners in various markets. One of its key pillars is winning what she called “the 3 by 3.” This refers to what Cassidy believes are its three largest market opportunities of the US, the UK and Australia, as well as the three “super jobs” of core accounting, accounts payable and receivable, and payroll.
“These are the jobs that you and your small businesses have told us are critically important, and we need to invest deeper in making them truly magical. They need to feel seamless on Xero,” she said.
Relatedly, another major component of this strategy is “really building a next generation way to go to market.” Xero, she said, will focus especially on the way it partners with accountants and bookkeepers, how to enhance its direct channel, and optimizing how it prices and packages its products in a way that encourages people “to try us, use us, and stay with us.”
Connected to this is a push to what Cassidy said is to “win the future,” namely to enhance the customer experience across its portfolio of markets through focused technology investments in things like AI, the mobile experience, and AI through the mobile experience in a way that will grow Xero’s presence across the world.
“Everyone is talking about AI, going on about AI, but AI for us is making our experiences seamless for our customers and automating the right tasks. When we think about where it meets mobile, you can do some pretty magical things. That mobile [experience] can be reimagined when we think about voice assistance, as an example,” she said.
Supporting these efforts have been recent additions to the company’s leadership team with strong tech industry credentials. Cassidy herself had once worked at Google; in addition, she mentioned Xero’s chief product and technology officer Diya Jolly, another Google alum, as well as people like chief marketing officer Michael Strickman, who came from Uber, and Ashley Grech, who came from Square.
These areas of focus point to a larger rethinking of the company’s foundations and aspirations and “frankly, going for it” that involves returning to the company’s entrepreneurial roots. Cassidy noted that the founders of the company built Xero with agility and speed in mind, and wants to lean harder in that direction, as “speed matters.” This in mind, she voiced a commitment to “keeping those things that are special about Xero” even amid this new strategy.
Overall, she stressed that this is “not a strategy on a page” that is printed out only to be forgotten. She said that implementing this vision will be essential to making sure Xero has the agility to respond to a rapidly changing business environment while staying true to its own values.
“If we do those things, we can, and will, win on purpose,” she said.
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