Xero

The 2025 Value of Design Black Pin recipients, Xero,  have embedded design into the heart of their organisation. From their founding principle to “make it beautiful”, to elevating design leadership onto their executive team, they’ve built a culture where design isn’t an afterthought — it’s how they solve problems, shape strategy, and support millions of small businesses worldwide.

They’ve also applied design with incredible rigour — undertaking a full design audit across thousands of screens and customer journeys, building shared UI patterns, and introducing a single design language. Their Customer Journey Framework now unifies teams across the company, ensuring every experience feels seamless and consistent. 

And importantly, this design commitment is delivering real impact. From launching the Partner Hub for accountants and bookkeepers, to reimagining their mobile experience, to creating the AI-powered companion — they’ve shown how design can drive innovation, efficiency, and customer delight. Their data is even helping governments and small businesses understand the economy.

This is design creating measurable commercial, operational, and social value — not just for Xero, but right across the entire small business ecosystem. 
Jeremy Moon, Value of Design judge presented the Black Pin

Xero Case Study:
Xero is a small business accounting software that provides a platform on which businesses can build a fully integrated solution. Xero minimises tedious admin by automating routine tasks, delivers valuable insights when needed, and brings together business data, trusted advisors, and powerful apps in one intuitive platform. By alleviating pain points, Xero empowers small business owners to supercharge their business, simplifying the complex and freeing up time from manual admin so they can focus on what really matters to build the business theyʼve always envisaged.

Xero is committed to supporting its accounting and bookkeeping partners, who play a vital role in the success of small businesses. Together, we advocate for the millions of small businesses who are the backbone of the global economy.

Everything we do at Xero is grounded in our purpose: to make life better for people in small business, their advisors (accountants and bookkeepers), and communities around the world, from our products and technology to how we support our customers, people, and communities.

This purpose guides everything we do, from our strategy and product design to how we support our customers, people, and communities worldwide. Our customers love that Xero makes it easy to run their business and manage their finances from anywhere.

Beyond our products, we are dedicated to building a socially and environmentally responsible business. We also recognise our responsibility to help small businesses on their own path to sustainability.

Xero has 4.4 million subscribers across New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and more than 180 countries around the world. 

Q: How would you describe the design culture of the business? If you had to boil it down, what are the 2 biggest contributions a design mindset or practice has created over the history of Xero. 

1. Make it Beautiful
Xero was founded in 2006 in NZ with the sole purpose of simplifying small business accounting. With a vision, to create a cloud-accounting platform that was user friendly, real-time and simple to use, or what we called "beautiful business". This goes beyond aesthetics, focusing on creating seamless and delightful experiences that customers love. We challenge ourselves to fall in love with the customer's problem, innovate, and inspire our communities and each other with our best work.

This principle embodies the entire business journey for our customers, celebrating the successes and growth they achieve using the Xero platform. It's about empowering small businesses to thrive by making their financial management effortless, allowing them to focus on the milestones that matter, like making their first sale or expanding their business. Even as the industry has evolved around us, this mindset has remained a cornerstone of Xeroʼs identity.

By embedding ‘beautiful designʼ into the heart of business software, Xero has helped put Aotearoa on the global design map - showing that world-class innovation can emerge from New Zealand, and inspiring other companies to place design at the centre of their strategy.

2. Establishing Design as a Core Competitive Advantage
In February 2024, Che Douglas, our new SVP/Executive General Manager of Design established a company-wide design strategy; to make design a core competitive advantage for Xero. By directly aligning our design efforts with our product strategy, weʼve empowered our product and technology teams to deliver on key priorities more effectively.

This strategic shift integrated design into the core business operation. We also undertook a major redesign of our foundational systems, moving from a fragmented approach to building a single, unified customer experience. This effort, supported by an upgraded design operating system, has enabled us to achieve greater efficiencies and excellence across our teams, creating a massive impact that benefits not just our users, but our entire business ecosystem. Specific examples of this can be found below under Reimaging Product Design at Xero.

Che Douglas is now a key member of the Xero Executive Leadership Team (ELT).

How has the business grown by design over the years?
From our beginnings sitting around the kitchen table in a small apartment in New Zealand to serving customers in more than 180 countries today, design has been one of the core engines of our growth. Weʼve always believed that by making business beautiful, we could empower millions. Our success is a direct result of this design-led philosophy, which has evolved through three key phases.

First, we redefined an industry. When Xero launched, accounting software was complex and intimidating. Our initial design strategy focused on simplicity and clarity, creating an intuitive product that felt more like a modern app than a traditional enterprise tool. This wasnʼt just about aesthetics; it was about solving a real problem for small business owners. This user-first design approach was our most effective marketing, driving rapid early adoption and building a community of loyal customers.

Next, we scaled the ecosystem by design. We realized that to truly empower businesses, we had to connect them to a wider ecosystem. We strategically designed an open platform with a seamless API, integrating Xero with thousands of third-party apps. This created a unified "platform for business" that deepened customer engagement and solidified our position as the central hub for small businesses worldwide.

Today, design is embedded in our DNA. Itʼs a company-wide philosophy. We use human-centered design to understand and serve our global community, with teams embedded in every product area to ensure weʼre always innovating. By prioritizing empathy and a mature design system, we continue to create intuitive experiences, from AI-powered tools to enhanced mobile apps.

Xeroʼs growth has been designed, from reimagining accounting as something simple and human, to building a connected ecosystem, and now leading a global community of small businesses. This design-first philosophy has not only created a product beloved by millions, but has inspired new standards for digital product design, cementing Aotearoaʼs reputation as a world leader in design-led innovation.

Product Design & Research at Xero
Our Design team, spanning Product Design, UX Research, Service Design, Operations, and Prototyping, has scaled dramatically over the past three years to meet the demands of a global stage. We restructured compensation to attract world-class talent while enabling many to relocate back home to Aotearoa, strengthening New Zealandʼs role as a global design hub.

Our Design: Engineering ratio is deliberately high, allowing for a robust research function that informs strategy rather than just validating concepts. In FY25, we surveyed over 10,000 customers and ran 900+ in-depth interviews.

Looking ahead, our investment in research labs in NZ and AU will deepen this connection, embedding customer voices into every step of our design process and reinforcing design as the engine of growth at Xero.

Anything else you want to share that is evidence of the value of design mindset or skills and processes that have created within Xero to get to where you are today?

Across 2025, we elevated design into a core competitive advantage for Xero. By fundamentally shifting our approach, we ensured every design decision was laser-focused on solving the most critical customer problems and advancing our highest strategic goals. This transformation delivered measurable impact, creating a ripple effect of value for our customers, our partners, and the entire Xero ecosystem.

A cornerstone of this strategy was our commitment to inclusive and accessible design. We believe that building truly beautiful experiences means designing for everyone. By embedding accessibility into our core design process as a non-negotiable "must", weʼve created more intuitive and robust products for all our customers. We are also pioneering new, accessible ways for small businesses to interact with their data, from voice and touch to mobile and AI, ensuring they can run their business from anywhere, at any time.

Designing for One Experience
Design Audit
To deliver a single, unified experience, we first needed to create a comprehensive map to guide the future of design at Xero. In FY25, we prioritized 12 key customer journeys and flows, which included mapping a total of 52 user journeys, 234 user flows, and 3,759 individual screens.

UI Patterns
To build for One-Experience, we evolved our UI patterns to drive cohesion quality and reduce friction for our customers. UI patterns are reusable solutions of elements, interactions, flows, and documentation for common design problems. UI patterns ensure product cohesion and documented best practices for better usability and user satisfaction. Our design patterns create a future focussed view of our UI as we build towards the next evolution of Xeroʼs design & customer experiences.

Introduction of a single design language 
Over the past 12 months, we established a Figma-based UI toolkit that provides the elements, structures, and examples needed for our design teams to work as one. This new toolkit has been scaled and deeply embedded into our workflows, allowing us to operate as a single, unified design team.

Customer Journey Framework
To support our future growth aspirations and enable innovation and operational excellence we needed a way to unify our employees, across many teams, around a holistic customer view of their jobs and journeys. Our Service Design team built the Customer Journey Framework (CJF). Which is an end-to-end view of the jobs (JTBD) and journeys of a small business or accountant and bookkeeper, beyond their role as a Xero customer. It describes their business experiences from their own perspective.

The CJF provides a shared language and hierarchy of our customers' needs from their point of view. By creating this common taxonomy, we can all speak the same language when it comes to understanding our customers. The CJF also gives us a structured set of tools to document customer journeys, enabling our teams to design together. The power of this framework is its scale; it's rare to see a human-centered design approach embraced so widely in a SaaS company. The CJF has become one of Xeroʼs keystone documents, helping to make us a truly customer-obsessed organisation. To learn more, read our public-facing article here.

New Navigation and Homepage
Weʼve built a more intuitive navigation and insight-rich homepage. Our customers are now able to get a clearer view of business performance quickly with new widgets that highlight what needs your attention. The tailored view helps you stay focused on what matters most and take common actions directly from the page. The new homepage is currently in beta and will start rolling out to all customers globally in November.

Launch of Xero Partner Hub
Accountants and bookkeepers told us that switching between our different practice tools – Xero HQ, Practice Manager, Tax, and Workpapers – broke their flow and cost them time. We listened and worked with more than 2,000 accountants and bookkeepers to design the new Xero Partner Hub. The Xero Partner Hub brings all of our tools and data into one place. Read more here.

Just Ask Xero (JAX)
Xero is also pioneering new ways for our customers to interact with their data, from voice, to touch, to mobile, ensuring customers can stay in touch with their business and new paradigms like AI.

Our design team helped to deliver JAX “Just Ask Xeroˮ, our AI business companion and financial superagen. JAX learns how your business runs, automating tasks and workflows, and delivering actionable insights, orchestrating multiple AI agents to cut busywork and help you make smarter decisions. All of this is delivered by a trusted partner built for you, with you. Read more about the latest evolution of JAX here.

Xero Small Business Insights (XSBI)
Using data from the Xero platform, our Xero Small Business Insights (XSBI) program offers a unique perspective on the small business economy. Since 2017, the program has provided free data and analysis for New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and Canada – all part of our commitment to championing small businesses.

The XSBI program provides regular updates on sales, jobs, and wages by analysing aggregated and anonymized data from hundreds of thousands of Xero subscribers to track the performance of, and improve understanding about, small businesses. This data is more accurate than traditional surveys and is trusted by governments and academics. Empowering Small Businesses We also empower small businesses through the Xero Beautiful Business Fund , which was introduced in 2023. This fund is designed to back the future aspirations of small businesses across New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South Africa, the US, Canada, and the UK. Eligible customers can apply for a share of the NZD $750,000 global prize pool in one of four categories: Innovating for Environmental Sustainability, Strengthening Community Connection, Trailblazing with Technology, and Upskilling for the Future.

Empowering Small Businesses
We also empower small businesses through the Xero Beautiful Business Fund , which was introduced in 2023. This fund is designed to back the future aspirations of small businesses across New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South Africa, the US, Canada, and the UK. Eligible customers can apply for a share of the NZD $750,000 global prize pool in one of four categories: Innovating for Environmental Sustainability, Strengthening Community Connection, Trailblazing with Technology, and Upskilling for the Future.

FY26 Design partnerships:
● Held Web Accessibility & Inclusive Design meetup at Xero Melbourne
● Supporting Ladies that UX Melbourne
● Supporting Figma friends community events in ANZ
● Design leaders speaking at various events like Product & Design Outlook, Miro etc.
● We are also exploring expanding our partnership with Women in Technology to include our UK region and the Design org