Matt Rickards.Lead Product Manager & Product Builder.
Building products users love, at scale.
Scroll to readHey there, I'm Matt 👋 - a builder and product leader with 15 years of experience. I'm currently a Lead PM at Xero leading big bet initiatives & strategy in the mobile app experience. Prior to Xero, I've worked in product roles at ThoughtWorks, Toyota, Suncorp Group and as a consultant with clients including Officeworks, NAB, ANZ, Transport for NSW, SportsBet & UniSuper.
I work end to end, from concept discovery and strategy through to ship, measure and learn. I prefer the kind of teams where the line between PM, design and engineering blurs.
The last decade has been spent shipping products millions of people use, not slides about products people might use. I care about taste, building teams that hum, and the small details that compound into something that feels alive.
A few principles I keep coming back to:
- Default to writing. Specs, decisions, and "why this, why now" memos. Talking is faster, but writing is honest.
- Ship the spike before the spec. A working prototype answers questions a deck can only pose. Great for alignment.
- Simplicity is a feature. Every line, every option, every step is a tax. Justify each one.
- Pick the team, then pick the problem. Small groups of high trust people beat process every time.
- Outcome over output. A roadmap full of shipped tickets is not the same as a product that works, and shifts the metrics that matter.
The fastest way to reach me:
- Email — mattrickards@outlook.com
- LinkedIn — linkedin.com/in/mattrickards
Lead Product Manager — Xero
2020 → Present
In 2020, I joined Xero as a Product Manager, working on a 0-1 greenfield product for sole traders.
Leading product for Xero's mobile experience - the Xero Accounting App, developing the underlying product strategy and delivering functionality that's used by 600k+ monthly active users.
- I overhauled the onboarding funnel and grew paid subscriptions by +117% YoY. This directly translated to ~$1.5m ARR.
- Launched a 0 → 1 product to a TAM of 2.5m.
- Led a navigation and information architecture redesign of the Xero mobile app with 600K MAU, improving feature discoverability by 35 percentage points (45% → 80%).
👉 Xero Mobile Global Navigation
I led and shipped a new Information Architecture & Global Navigation implementation for the Xero Accounting App - available to 4.5 million customers. This initiative was aimed at boosting efficiency in completing accounting jobs on mobile, allowing users to get in and out faster - touching all areas of the app and product features that sit inside.
👉 Xero Onboarding Funnel
I led and shipped the onboarding funnel starting at account creation through to purchasing a subscription then finishing in a guided setup experience. Prior, this funnel didn't exist on Xero's mobile app, resulting in an additional ~$2m in yearly revenue for Xero. It sees the creation of ~400 new accounts and subscriptions purchases per day.
Post subscription payment success, it's then down to "how do we get customers to the aha! moment faster?". The guided setup experience was built to get users setup and using Xero ASAP. Delivering this feature led to a decrease of x% in subscription churn.
👉 Xero Go
Led the 0-1 delivery of Xero’s inaugural freemium product, specifically designed for sole traders. Managed the full product lifecycle from initial concept & strategy to GTM, including a complete rebuild of the accounting engine to simplify financial management for novice business owners.
Senior Product Manager — ThoughtWorks
2018 → 2020
👉 Feature Provisioning Service: Xero
Led the 0-1 build of Xero’s feature provisioning engine, the service that powers feature access for all subscriptions - who has access to what. The service is capable of 100k+ requests per second. Successfully drove adoption of the services across 50+ dependent internal teams. Enabled a strategic overhaul of Xero’s pricing & feature bundles, facilitating the launch of new product tiers to maximize Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).
👉 Google Cloud Automation & Pipelines: ANZ Bank
Played the product role in a technical, greenfield build of ANZ's first deployment pipeline "in the cloud" for internal customers. Enabled engineering teams at the bank to run containerised workloads in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that had container scanning enabled to identify any security vulnerabilities before deploying to production systems. Enabled one click deployments as opposed to long running, multi step deployments that took hours.
👉 Product Management Coaching: National Australia Bank
Acted as a mentor/coach for product managers across multiple different domains at the bank. Uplifted the product thinking and maturity, helping product people thrive and deliver.
Senior Product Manager — Toyota
2016 → 2018
👉 myToyota
Led the greenfield development and launch of the myToyota app, serving a user base of 3.5M+ owners in Australia. The app allows users to monitor vehicle health, issue remote commands, and manage any outstanding factory recalls.
Product Manager, Delivery Lead — Outware Mobile
2015 → 2016
Played a key role in a mobile design & development agency, delivering multiple multi million dollar products for well known Australian brands. During my time, I often wore a mixture of product, delivery and QA hats. Clients included Opal Travel (NSW Govt.), Australian Football League (AFL), NIB Health Insurance & Officeworks.
Various Roles
2012 → 2016
👉 Elabor8 Consulting
Worked with various clients as a business analyst, mapping requirements, facilitating team ceremonies and uplifting agile maturity.
👉 Suncorp Group
Returning to where it all began! The Suncorp graduate program. Fresh out of university, I joined the Data Warehouse & Business Intelligence team, where I played the business analyst role, acting as the bridge between the business and engineering.
By working closely with insurance underwriters, I helped deliver data insights in the form of Tableau dashboards that empowered them to analyse specific suburbs and towns, allowing for a more precise assessment of risk for both home and motor claims to inform insurance policy prices.
A running, lightly-edited log of things I'm building:
Outside of work I'm usually..
- Pickleballing. Average play, mostly. The point is having a laugh!
- Running. Great to clear the head and stay fit.
- Gaming. A mix of first person shooters and sim racing.
- Chasing after kids They take up all the other spare time!
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. Send me a note — I read every email.
- Design — Matt Rickards
- Development — Matt Rickards, Claude Code & Cursor
- Typography — Inter
- Hosting — Vercel