Regional Product Owner, Accounting & Tax

Overview

This leadership role owns the Accounting & Tax (A&T) product end to end, including global scope, standards, commercial logic, processes, and economics. The position is responsible for worldwide growth, profitability, and reputation of A&T and reports to the Chief Delivery Officer.

The role serves as the senior product and delivery authority for A&T in the market, translating market and customer demands into how the service is designed, packaged, priced, and delivered.

Regional delivery leadership is provided through the Outsourcing Control (OC) leads, with responsibility for building the delivery organization to meet both market opportunity and client expectations.

Responsibilities

Commercial Leadership & Growth

• Own the growth agenda for A&T: revenue, win rate, retention, and expansion.
• Serve as the senior client-facing product authority for A&T, including strategic engagements, pitches, high-stakes decisions, and escalations.
• Partner with Revenue and Sales to qualify opportunities, shape scope and pricing, and support conversion and expansion.
• Define and evolve commercial logic, including packaging, bundling, premiums, and guardrails, to enable profitable scale.
• Own the reputation of the A&T product in the market.

Product Strategy & Standards

• Own regional scope, service definitions, and standards for A&T (what is in, what is out, and how it is delivered).
• Set regional execution standards, SLAs, and compliance expectations across regions and delivery models.
• Drive consistency of delivery across regions while enabling flexibility within agreed guardrails.

Market Insight & Service Design

• Maintain an up-to-date view of market trends, competitor moves, and evolving customer demands as the ultimate subject-matter expert.
• Translate market and client insight into service design and delivery organization structure.
• Shape the product roadmap and delivery-model choices (in-house, outsourced, automated) to capture growth opportunities.

Process Standardisation & Continuous Improvement

• Set the regional A&T operating model and process standards.
• Approve processes, SOPs, and control frameworks before they enter delivery.
• Support the enterprise AI direction and drive adoption within A&T to enable scale and quality.

Cost Management & Commercial Sustainability

• Own product-level cost-to-serve for A&T, driving efficiency, productivity, and long-term economic sustainability.
• Make deliberate trade-offs across scope design, automation, sourcing, and delivery-model choices to keep delivery economics healthy as the product scales.
• Diagnose cost pressures, identify root causes, and lead corrective action with Finance on modelling and analysis.

Regional Delivery Governance & Team Leadership

• Lead the Outsourcing Control leads accountable for regional delivery outcomes and economics.
• Provide the framework for regional autonomy (in-house versus outsourced mix, capacity, and hiring proposals) and arbitrate cross-regional or peer-function disagreements when escalated.
• Lead, mentor, and develop the OC leads; build product, commercial, and delivery capability across the global A&T team.

Scope & Commercial Governance

• Propose and own changes to product scope, service tiers, and commercial logic through the agreed approval framework for impact assessment and implementation readiness.
• Support enabling functions on scope-to-catalogue mapping, SKU registration, and pricing alignment.
• Validate post-implementation effectiveness of scope and commercial changes using defined metrics and refine where needed.

Compliance, Audit & Risk

• Set the regional compliance posture for A&T across accounting standards (IFRS, local GAAP), tax legislation, and statutory reporting requirements.
• Ensure internal controls and regulatory adherence across every jurisdiction the product serves.
• Engage with internal and external audit on A&T product-level matters.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with the Chief Delivery Officer, peer Global Product Owners, Revenue, Technology, and enabling functions across Delivery.
• Represent the A&T product in cross-functional and executive forums.

Key Performance Indicators

• Revenue growth and win rate
• Retention and net revenue retention (NRR)
• Margin and cost-to-serve
• Delivery SLA attainment and quality
• Client satisfaction (NPS)

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, or a related field; CPA, CA, ACCA, or equivalent professional accounting qualification preferred. MBA or equivalent is a plus.
• 15+ years of experience in accounting, tax, or finance operations, with at least 5 years owning a product, service line, or regional/global function end to end.
• Managing Director–level leadership experience, with the gravitas to operate as a senior commercial and product leader.
• Track record of driving growth (revenue, win rate, retention, and expansion), not only delivery.
• Experience running a service-line P&L at scale, owning cost-to-serve, productivity, margin, and pricing logic.
• Strong working knowledge of IFRS and local GAAP, tax legislation, and statutory reporting requirements across multiple regions (APAC, EMEA, and ideally the Americas).
• Demonstrated experience designing service standards, commercial logic (packaging, bundling, premiums), and pricing frameworks.
• Strong client-facing and business-development capability; comfortable acting as the senior product voice in front of clients and prospects.
• Experience leading senior delivery and product leaders (regional heads, process leads, and outsourcing-control/vendor-management leads) across multiple regions.
• Deep market awareness and the ability to interpret trends and customer demand to shape the service.
• Process-oriented mindset: global standards as the foundation for scalable, sustainable delivery, with judgment on where flexibility serves the client.
• Strong analytical and strategic problem-solving skills, including comfort with financial modelling, scenario analysis, and unit economics.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills; ability to influence at executive level.
• Proficiency in accounting platforms—Xero in particular (the central A&T platform)—and other ERP/accounting systems (QuickBooks, SAP, Oracle, or equivalent).
• Comfort with AI-assisted tools and automation as enablers of product scale and quality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience as a product or service-line head in a global outsourced accounting/corporate-services firm or in a Big-4 advisory/managed services context.
• Experience leading a P&L turnaround, transformation, or in-housing programme.
• Experience operating in an EoR, PEO, or global business services environment.

Compensation & Benefits

• Compensation and benefits details were not provided in the source description.