Chief Product Officer

The client

Buddy Advisory is proud to be partnering with PaySauce (NZX: PYS), a mobile-first payroll platform built for small businesses across New Zealand and Australia. Founded in 2015 and listed on the NZX, PaySauce is a 40-person team generating $9.2m in annual revenue, serving 8,600+ customers and processing over $13 billion in payroll. PaySauce makes payday simple, compliant, and stress-free for hands-on employers in industries from farming and trades to hospitality and retail.

With a mature, cash-generative New Zealand business behind it and a freshly launched Australian operation, PaySauce is at a genuine inflection point, and this role sits right at the centre of what comes next.

The role

With product at the centre of PaySauce's growth story, we're looking for a Chief Product Officer to own the product vision, strategy, and function. As a member of the Executive Leadership Team, you'll navigate a mature NZ market alongside a rapidly expanding Australian/APAC opportunity, driving high-stakes investment decisions, building a product team that delivers, and keeping every call grounded in customer reality and commercial return.

PaySauce has a functional product with a loyal customer base. The opportunity now is to take it from functional to exceptional; evolving the roadmap, tightening the connection between product and business strategy, and creating an environment where product, engineering, and design work in genuine unison.

The responsibilities

• Lead product strategy informed by customer research, market intelligence, payroll legislation, and competitor activity across NZ, Australia and beyond.

• Own the product portfolio; allocate resources to the highest-value opportunities and balance short-term delivery with long-term platform investment.

• Evolve how PaySauce approaches roadmap prioritisation, moving from reactive to strategically driven, with decisions clearly connected to business outcomes.

• Create the conditions for product, engineering, and design to work in unison; shared priorities, clear process, and a culture of collective ownership.

• Build, lead, and develop a small product function, setting the standard for how product is done at PaySauce.

• Establish disciplined product discovery, validation, and outcome measurement practices across the team.

• Partner with Development, Customer Experience, Growth, Finance, and People leaders to align product priorities with company objectives.

• Represent product at Board, executive, and external stakeholder discussions; deliver Board papers and contribute to the Audit & Risk Committee as required.

The requirements

• Extensive product management leadership experience from a B2B SaaS company. Experience in a regulated industry (payroll, fintech, financial services, or similar) and familiarity with NZ or Australian compliance contexts will be viewed favourably.

• A track record of owning product strategy and delivery end-to-end: from vision and roadmap through to measurable commercial outcomes.

• The ability to connect product decisions to business strategy, not just advocate for the roadmap but demonstrate how it drives growth, retention, and competitive advantage.

• Proven team builder; you've hired well, coached hard, and set a high bar.

• Strong commercial instincts; you can build a business case, read a P&L, and connect product decisions to revenue and retention.

• High emotional intelligence; you bring people with you, navigate competing priorities without creating casualties, and know when to push and when to listen.

• Executive presence: comfortable presenting to a Board, influencing a CEO, and engaging customers in the same week.

Why join

• Lead the product function at a profitable, NZX-listed SaaS company in the middle of its most significant growth chapter.

• A product with genuine market fit and room to go from good to great, the foundation is there; the opportunity is to elevate it.

• Real scope: a dominant NZ market position plus a greenfield Australian opportunity (targeting 694,000+ micro-businesses!)

• Executive team seat with genuine influence over strategy, investment, and how the business grows.

• A lean, high-trust environment where decisions get made and things get built.

  Apply now! Applications close 5pm, Friday 10 July.