Holiday!
I’m off-line until August the 11th. Away from email, phone, and comment moderation. Yippee!
The focus now at Xero is building our operational capability. We’re looking for a number of passionate people for a variety of roles.
One particular role that I hope will appeal to someone reading this is Online Product Marketing.
This would be ideal for someone with a web design background who wants to take their career towards marketing. The role of product marketing is to communicate the features and benefits of Xero to support the sales process. This might include Flash collateral, feature video’s videos, web copy, podcasts … whatever.
This is a key role for us and you’ll have a lot of scope to push the envelope.
Would also help if you are good at bowling.
A startup I’m involved with, based in the Icehouse, is looking for a full time User Interface Specialist.
This is a fantastic opportunity in a start-up SaaS company where stunning design and excellent UI is a key to success. You need:
- HTML and CSS Expertise
- Knowledge of Java Script Libraries such as Prototype and Script.aculo.us
- A passion for stunning design
Small team, lots of room to grow, in a great environment. Contact Steve.
We’re looking for a Technical Operations Manager to join our team. (You don’t need to be an Olympic Gold medalist, a Commonwealth champ would do).
We’re looking for:
- Currently or recently in a significant IT operations management role.
- Demonstrated experience in enterprise-scale production system operations, particularly web application hosting infrastructure and Internet connectivity.
- Demonstrated understanding of support delivery (help desk, incident management, problem management, configuration & change management), and service delivery systems and processes (service-level management, capacity management, availability management and disaster recovery planning)
- Proven track record in the leadership of technical support and operational teams, including management of outsource teams/functions
- Career background in systems administration type roles (DBA, web infrastructure administration, Unix/Linux/Windows server host administration)
This is a key role for us. If you’re interested, email your details to us at jobs@xero.com
You may have noticed the latest Xero is national treasure Hamish Carter.
Several months ago we were thinking who would be our dream person to get on the team. Someone that our local customers and partners would admire but also global enough to be known in our target markets.
We wanted someone who could relate to small business owners. A great communicator, smart and inspirational.
Easy. Hamish Carter.
I’d met Hamish a few times at Cap Gemini functions and I was impressed with how he enthralled a room and how he related his experiences to business. I’d bumped into a Hamish a few times as well in the Hawkes Bay so knew he had good taste.
We figured Hamish would be looking for a career after sport, and just felt that our opportunity might be something that would light his candle. As a professional sportsman Hamish is a small business. The demographics of his sport means that he is talking to our target customers every day.
The Hamish Carter brand is very aligned with ours. What Hamish has achieved in sport translates to what we’re doing, and how we want to help our customers. Big Vision, Goal setting, Use of Coaching, High Performance, Celebrate Success.
We are just stoked that Hamish has joined our team. It’s a big responsibility. Hamish is golden. He leaves the first part of his career on a high. We need to make sure the second part of his career is equally stratospheric.
Thanks again to Andrew for speedily making changes to my WordPress site.
I’ve done a bit of a page reorg as (very) often your comments are more interesting than my own rantings and there has been some useful discussion over the past few weeks. So you can now see Recent Comments (——-> over there).
In 2006 I somewhat achieved my shameless self promotion goals so my bio comes off the front page into the site navigation bar. (The reason for the personal brand pumping will be obvious soon.) These pages are just ‘Pages’ in WordPress and managed just like Blog Entries.
For those not familiar with Trackbacks, these are where people have linked to a blog entry from their own site. You can go and see what they say.
For those of you wanting to deploy Recent Comments the plugin information is here.
Next big release of WordPress is due on January 22. Looking forward to seeing what’s in there.
Over the last few weeks there has been a number of pretty shocking violent events that you wouldn’t normally associate with NZ.
It amazes me that the Police track down the baddies and make arrests so quickly. You’d hate to think those animals could get away what they’ve been doing.
The Police have a tough time. I think the speed they turned over the last few incidents has been outstanding.
Yay the Police.
My first Angel investment had its initial media surfacing on Monday.
PlanHQ is run by Tim Norton. It’s a Ruby on Rails development with Koz, Ben and Nat in the initial team.
PlanHQ is the lightweight collaborative business planning tool we’ve always wanted. It surfaced a few weeks early than we wanted but you can sign up now to be considered for the closed beta and you should see it in production by year end.
I’m investing in a number of tools that I’ve always wanted to run the businesses that I’ve been involved with. All are Software as a Service (SaaS) space and examples of Fund, Design, Build etc …
The PlanHQ team are all really bright and motivated. This one is a good example of Web 2.0 thinking applied to solving a significant business problem.
Get on the beta, give us feedback. This one will go global quickly.
This is a cool role, that seldom comes up in New Zealand.
We want a Product Manager for our ‘mission critical small to medium business application using Web 2.0 technology’.
Ken Norton does a good summary of How to hire a product manager that covers off some of our criteria.
Key responsibilities of Product Management are:
- Owning the feature set of the product
- Channelling customer requirements into a release schedule
- Maintaining competitive analysis
- Bringing products to launch (Real Artists Ship)
We suspect that there are few people in NZ that actually have Product Management experience so you might come from a Business Analysis background. We’re happy to develop someone into this exciting and key role.
I’ve got a couple of short Interaction Design projects. Probably 1-2 weeks work each.
Each project is to take a concept and develop an Interaction Specification that could be used to build a software prototype. Output of the process might be screen diagrams, HTML mockup or Flash demo. Whatever you prefer.
Doesn’t need full time effort. Let me know if you’re interested.
I’m looking for a couple of special people to join a new venture.
1. HTML/CSS Guru.
This person will take the visuals from our Interaction Design Team and produce cleanly structured page templates to hand over to development.
This role requires:
- extensive experience building standards based web sites
- thorough understanding of the DOM
- general understanding of javascript/AJAX
- experience with complex design layouts
This is an exciting role for someone who wants to push the boundaries on what you can do in a browser.
2. User Documentation Specialist (who can make a difference)
You may be the right person for us if you subscribe to ‘creating passionate users‘ …
Email me with a CV and demo links if you’d like to learn more. Roles are based in Wellington.
Today was my last day at Quest.
It’s been a wild ride (blogged from beginning to end).
Archive Manager (nee AfterMail) is now well integrated into Quest with the right people in the right roles. I’m proud of how the acquisition has gone and that our NZ team has grown in both size and skill and are now part of a fantastic global company. This week we have several of our team all over the world and its exciting that they’re getting the experience of developing a global software product and taking it to the world.
Transitioning from the CEO of a small company, and working on the deal for several months, almost none of the activities you do pre-acquistion, you do post acquisition, so my focus was evangelizing the product around our multinational sales team. I really enjoyed that, but my passion is taking an idea, building a team and creating something from nothing.
I really like Quest. Its been a great experience especially making friends around the Globe. If I was sans kids I’d probably take the opportunity to move up to the US with Quest but with a family now I need to get back to normal hours and operate in time-zone for a while.
I hope to remain close to the company. For the next week at least I’ll enjoy the silence of my disconnected BlackBerry.
For all the many people that have helped over the past few years. Thank you very, very much.
I’m out for a week. Hoping to avoid the internet, email, comments and crackberry.
Bula.
Update:
blog