I applied online. An in-house recruiter called after a couple of weeks to discuss/screen. Recruiter was good and seemingly understood the role and requirements. In the interviews some basic questions around technology, strategy and team management were asked. There were no probing follow-up questions. I felt like I was lecturing the interviewers or giving away free consultancy. However, I made sure to provide concrete situations and examples from my current role to back the basic "theory" I was lecturing them on :) After the second interview, I was reflecting on my experience. I couldn't help but wonder, whether the interviewers were really just senior developers who were recently promoted. The bar must be quite low, since Xero is still a start-up trying to scale. The up-side was, me genuinely thinking that I can add serious value to the role I was interviewing for. My engineering experience and proven track record of managing large teams in complex enterprise environments would have made this job a win-win for me as a professional and Xero as a scale-up. After not hearing anything for 2 weeks, and having to follow-up with the recruiter for an update, I knew the feeling wasn't mutual. :) I have interviewed with these so-called "scale-ups" before and faced genuine discrimination from the incumbent senior management interviewers. I've heard all kinds of excuses. A couple of gems are... "his style seems to be too enterprise-like" to "we found someone with SaaS experience". Guess what… a "scale-up" is literally a start-up trying to grow into becoming an Enterprise, usually targeting an IPO or trying to meet investor pressure post-IPO. Every large enterprise in the world today is essentially a SaaS, and engaging in e-commerce. As someone who started their career as a software developer, came up through the ranks to become a senior engineering leader, setting up/scaling teams in start-ups and in large corporations, while still retaining the ability to design and build an application from scratch by myself, I find these type of remarks to be useless and disrespectful. I'm never offended, I use every single interviewing experience as a training ground to ace that one eventual interview at the future employer who deserves my talents. That was my mindset as a young graduate, and it will be my mindset until the day I retire. My take is that these incumbent middle managers are so scared of qualified and experienced leaders coming into the organisation and setting a new bar, to the point that they will refuse to hire anyone that is deemed a threat. It's either that, or they are just scanning the market for other internal HR reasons, wasting our time (meaning they already have the preferred candidate). I think it's best for the CEO/CTO or the Board to interview candidates themselves for executive leadership positions. VCs should demand this, given that Xero has raised approximately $140M of post IPO equity since 2015. The investors are betting on Xero's ability to scale. The odds are against the investors at this point in time. After the interview, I browsed Glassdoor and found a few similar Interview drama stories left here by senior Product Management and Agile professionals. Have a read for yourself. Good luck Xero, I hope you get the leaders you deserve.