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. It also leads the function as a Managing Director–level member of the Delivery leadership team, reporting to the Chief Delivery Officer. Accountabilities include growth, profitability, and reputation of A&T worldwide.

The primary objective is business growth through flawless delivery. You serve as the senior product and delivery authority for A&T—client-facing, trusted by prospects and key accounts, and a partner to Revenue and Sales in winning and expanding business. As the ultimate subject-matter expert, you stay close to market trends and customer demands and translate them into how the service is designed, packaged, priced, and delivered.

You lead the A&T function regionally through the Outsourcing Control (OC) leads. Responsibilities include building the delivery organization to meet market opportunity and client expectations, setting and defending global standards for scalable and sustainable delivery, and leading the teams who deliver A&T daily.

Responsibilities

Commercial Leadership & Growth

• Own the growth agenda for A&T: revenue, win rate, retention, and expansion.
• Act as the senior, client-facing product authority for A&T, anchoring strategic engagements, pitches, high-stakes decisions, and escalations.
• Partner with Revenue and Sales: qualify opportunities, shape scope and pricing, and support conversion and expansion of accounts.
• Define and evolve commercial logic—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/out and how it is delivered.
• Set regional execution standards, SLAs, and compliance expectations across all regions and delivery models.
• Drive consistency of delivery across regions while enabling flexibility within agreed guardrails.

Market Insight & Service Design

• Maintain a deep, current view of market trends, competitor moves, and evolving customer demands.
• Translate market and client insight into service design and delivery organization structure to meet both demand and expectations.
• 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 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 scope, automation, sourcing, and delivery-model trade-offs to keep delivery economics healthy as the product scales.
• Diagnose cost pressures, identify root causes, and lead corrective action with Finance modeling and analysis.

Regional Delivery Governance & Team Leadership

• Lead the Outsourcing Control leads accountable for regional delivery outcomes and economics.
• Define the framework for regional autonomy (in-house vs. 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, routing them 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 as 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 served by the product.
• 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 (KPIs)

• 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: 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 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, with the ability to read trends and customer demand and shape the service accordingly.
• Process-oriented mindset: belief that global standards are the foundation for scalable, sustainable delivery, with judgement to know 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, with the 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

• Not specified.

Location

• Not specified.