In 1 line, several people from leadership team will do the interview, but the sole decision maker is the CEO, who just talks with you for 20 minutes. The first few rounds, I spoke with all the leadership team members. All of them were nice and were humble and seemed like good team players, which seemed like a positive sign. However, all of them kept saying ‘Oh the CEO is our CPO as well and he makes the decisions’ and I did not know what they meant till I got into the call with the CEO. Got into the call with the CEO for half hour and was not sure on what to make of that call. There were no questions in this interview to understand the person, their skills or their style of working . Rather, it felt like he had a lot of assumptions about PMs from corporates and was trying to confirm his assumptions with this interview (not sure which companies he spoke with). For example. He said things like ‘these people need to be told what to do and are not very proactive’. Dont want to share other examples. I started pushing back on his assumptions, which I understood he did not like. After this they asked me to do a business case. Don't even want to talk about it, as it was a complete waste of time from both sides. I spoke for half hour and no one had a single question on the case. How is this even possible? Then I understood that CEO had already made a decision before the case. And nobody wanted to understand the case or my thinking anymore because nothing is going to change for them as the CEO already made the decision. If you are interviewing here, try to talk to the CEO as early as possible. All other interviews are just waste of time as CEO is the ultimate decision maker and others (even leadership) does not seem to have any decision making ability or authority.

Overall a very efficient process. I liked the team that I met. They were engaged and curious about my background. Standard recruiter round, followed by hiring manager, another round going deep into my product experience, take home assignment, and then surprisingly, a round with the CEO. The last round is the one that really matters. All prior rounds went really well. However, during the CEO round, he fixated on how many hours I would be available, saying things like "this is certainly no 8-5" and "what if you had to travel every week?". Most PM roles have a baseline workload and a few peaks around major deadlines. Looks like that's not the case here. The feeling I got was that the CEO expected PMs to prioritize work over family life, and be available whenever he wanted them to be available. Certainly not family friendly, despite the claims to be otherwise. Also, this could have been an easy 1st call conversation and not something that became the primary decision criteria after 20+hrs of time investment from the candidate for prep, take home presentation, and interviews. Some yellow flags I can see in hind sight 1. No CPO in a 1k+ employee company 2. CEO/Founder interviewing all PM candidates (how does he find time? Is that the best use of his time? Does he not trust his team?) 3. The PM team likely has low agency given CEO's deep involvement 4. Expectation that PMs be available at all times, disregarding family time constraints. I would recommend other interviewees to make sure you get your must-have constraints cleared before progressing to hiring manager round, so that you don't end up wasting time discussing those constraints in the last round with the CEO/Founder.