The Engineering Chapter

In the 2023 Engineering Chapter, we aim to help CTOs and engineering leaders at companies unlock opportunities and deal with common challenges that arise when building software products and scaling the company’s technical organisation. The sessions are designed to help companies nurture high performance engineering teams that can get stuff done quickly, while also making sure that the stuff that gets done is also done well.

Engineers are the force behind any software company’s product, but New Zealand’s software engineering community is underserved compared to some international powerhouses. That’s why our goal is to get technical leaders together in a room to hear tested tactics, anecdotes of victories and near fatal blows from the country’s best. This includes generating peer-to-peer discussions and panel input to get multidimensional views.

Meet Ben

The Engineering Chapter is led by Movac Operating Partner, Ben Gracewood, who is a CTO / VP of Engineering with experience across multiple sectors including SaaS, finance, and media. While a technologist at heart, his primary expertise is growing diverse, high-performance product engineering teams and implementing the culture, values, tools and processes required to deliver software at pace.

Ben was Vend’s first engineering manager, where he grew the engineering team from 8 to 80, shipped product on average every 6 minutes, and ultimately contributed to Vend’s ~NZ$500m exit. He’s also co-founder of NZ’s largest independent software engineering conference, Codemania.

The line-up

#1 High-Performance Software Engineering 101

Agenda: High-performance Software Engineering 101 – how to know if you’re good, what to focus on, and how to measure. We’ll bring you up to speed on how the very best engineering teams do their work, and send you away with a bunch of tools and techniques to evaluate and improve your teams.

This session is led by Ben Gracewood.

Details: Thursday 4 May 10-11.30am, online. Registrations closed.

#2 Everyone will always hate you and you will never deliver enough: welcome to Engineering

Agenda: Every job is hard, but software engineering in a SaaS product company is uniquely hard. All demands flow downhill and end up with engineering, demand is always greater than supply, and every feature you deliver just leads to more demand. Let’s get inside the heads of your internal customers, understand why they ask for the things they do, and work through some practical ways to handle and respond to the never-ending list of stuff to do.

This session is led by Ben Gracewood, and Michael Koziarski. Michael is the VP of Engineering, Retail at Lightspeed, a NYSE-listed point-of-sale and e-commerce software platform provider. Michael oversaw the integration of the Vend engineering teams and product into Lightspeed, when Lightspeed acquired Vend. Prior, Michael was the CTO at Vend.

This session is open to CTOs, CEOs and engineering leadership at Kiwi tech start-ups.

Details: Wednesday 24 May, 10am-11.30am, online. Registrations closed.

#3 The real work behind building a diverse, supportive, and high-performance engineering culture

Agenda: Diversity is more than just hiring different people, and high performance is more than just working long hours. Teams need to go beyond “just winging it” and do the work to put in place the systems and tools that break through our unconscious biases, ensure fairness, and support transparency. The session covers processes for recruitment, assessment, career growth, salary bands, performance management, and the rest.

This workshop is structured as a workshop and is led by Ben Gracewood, and Cara Fonseca-Ensor and guests. Cara is currently the Senior Director of Software Engineering at LightSpeed. Prior, she was VP of Engineering at Vend (which was acquired by Canadian-listed LightSpeed), and Engineering Manager at PushPay.

Details: Wednesday 21 June, 9-12pm, in person, NZTE offices, 139 Quay Street, Auckland CBD. This session is first reserved for Movac portfolio companies. Registrations closed.

#4 So you’re thinking about a rebuild…

Agenda: All product engineering teams reach a point where they believe they need to rebuild all or part of their product. The Planning Fallacy tells us that these rebuilds will take twice as long as we think and provide half the benefits that we expect. This session will explain why you should never rebuild and give you concrete alternatives; it will also explain how to run a successful rebuild project. Confused? So are we!

This session is led by Ben Gracewood, and Robert Fonseca-Ensor. Robert is currently the VP of Engineering at New Zealand crime-fighting intelligence platform Auror. Prior, he was the Engineering Lead at PushPay.

This webinar is open to CTOs and engineering leadership at Kiwi tech start-ups.

Details: Wednesday 2 August, 10-11.30am, online. Registrations closed.

#5 Building systems (software and human) to handle scale

Agenda: How do you go from 1 engineer to an R&D team of 100? What roles and layers should you introduce, and what ratios should you be using for product management, design, testing, and internal ops? How should you split up work across the team as it grows, without creating unhealthy silos?

​You’re about to go global and need to deal with customer issues throughout the night, or maybe you’ve scaled quickly and your systems are struggling to keep up with demand. Alerts are constantly pinging and the team is feeling burned out. Good news! These are signs of rapid growth and there is a way through them. Let’s talk about alert triage, system robustness, healthy on-call rotations and more.

​This session is led by Ben Gracewood, and Anne Dröge.

​Anne is VP of Product at Lightspeed, a NYSE-listed point-of-sale and e-commerce software platform provider. Prior to Lightspeed, Anne was at Zalando, Europe’s leading online platform for fashion and lifestyle.

​Ben is a CTO / VP of Engineering with experience across multiple sectors including SaaS, finance, and media. While a technologist at heart, his primary expertise is growing diverse, high-performance product engineering teams and implementing the culture, values, tools and processes required to deliver software at pace. ​Ben was Vend’s first engineering manager, where he grew the engineering team from 8 to 80, shipped product on average every 6 minutes, and ultimately contributed to Vend’s ~NZ$500m exit. He’s also co-founder of NZ’s largest independent software engineering conference, Codemania.

This workshop is open to CTOs, CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and engineering leadership.

Details: Tuesday 22 August, 1-2.30pm, online. Registrations closed.