Company overview
Xero is a global technology company offering cloud-based accounting solutions designed specifically for small businesses. With engineering teams spread across Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, and Toronto, managing clear ownership, consistency, and effective collaboration presented significant operational challenges.
Key wins
Comprehensive visibility and clear ownership: Cortex's centralized platform gave Xero a detailed view of all engineering assets, clarifying roles and responsibilities across global teams.
Balanced productivity and quality: Cortex effectively balanced the rapid pace of innovation with rigorous quality and compliance standards, reducing risk associated with fast deployments.
Executive-level engagement and strategic alignment: Adoption of Cortex elevated engineering from a tactical operation to a strategic priority, enhancing the overall impact of the engineering function on business outcomes.
Resource efficiency: By eliminating the ongoing maintenance burden of their homegrown solution, Cortex allowed engineering resources to focus more strategically on innovation and improvement rather than internal tooling.
The challenge
Initially, Xero managed internal software component tracking and ownership through spreadsheets, a common but increasingly ineffective approach as the organization expanded. Recognizing these limitations, Xero developed a custom internal developer portal (IDP) to better handle growth. However, as the company continued to scale, maintaining their homegrown IDP proved to be resource-intensive and lacked advanced features crucial for further growth. Xero needed more than a catalog, they needed an Engineering Operations platform.
The solution: transition to Cortex
Xero migrated from their homegrown IDP to Cortex, establishing it as the foundation of their Engineering Operations function.
Cortex significantly enhanced Xero’s engineering operations by:
Centralizing visibility and clarifying ownership: Cortex became Xero's single source of truth: automatically mapping services, dependencies, integrations, and ownership across their entire global stack. For the first time, leaders had the clarity needed to make confident operational decisions, not just guess at who owned the payments service.
Unlocking insights through engineering intelligence: Cortex transformed raw engineering data into actionable intelligence, surfacing risks, maturity gaps, and opportunities for improvement across Xero's distributed teams. Leaders could now understand trends, identify bottlenecks, and connect engineering health directly to business outcomes.
Automating standards through Scorecards: Cortex's Scorecards and Workflows gave Xero the mechanism to operationalize improvement at scale, setting shared definitions of "good," measuring progress against them, and embedding standards directly into developer workflows. This shifted engineering excellence from an aspiration to a repeatable, measurable practice executed quarter over quarter.
Driving strategic visibility across the organization: Perhaps most significantly, Cortex elevated engineering operations from a tactical, engineer-level concern to a strategic asset. General managers, heads of engineering, and executives across Xero now rely on Cortex as their primary source of intelligence for how software is built.
The migration to Cortex was a transformative step forward at Xero, having significantly enhanced engineering operational efficiency, accountability, and strategic visibility.
“Whether you're a general manager at Xero or an engineer, you're looking at Cortex as your source of intelligence about how we're building software. It's a massive leap forward for us.”
— Head of Engineering at Xero
Conclusion
At Xero, Cortex is the foundational platform for driving engineering excellence and creating a culture of continuous improvement. A the core of Xero’s engineering ecosystem, Cortex’s Engineering Operations Platform drives significant improvements in transparency, productivity, quality, and strategic alignment. This pivotal shift empowered Xero to scale effectively and focus their engineering team on other high-value work.
