Engineering management coach, consultant, and speaker
I’ve got a couple of decades of experience building and running high-performance software engineering teams, and tons of evidence that my approach works to build strong, inclusive cultures.
Whether you’re new to technical leadership or just need some fresh ears to help nut out a tricky problem, I’m here to help. I’ll draw on my experience with concrete examples and actions for you to leverage, and we’ll work together to develop an approach that is authentically you.
Engineering leadership coaching
I provide bespoke, one-on-one coaching and mentoring for you, or people in your team. Bring along a topic (or several!) that you’re struggling with, and we’ll dig into it together over the course of a 45 minute session. Either in-person or remote, your choice.
Get in touch to talk about how I can help.
What others are saying about me
“Working with Ben enabled me to build the highest performing product, engineering and design organization I have ever had the privilege of working with. Ben is an outstanding technical leader, with an unrelenting focus on delivering value. But his real secret sauce is his calm, thoughtful, caring approach, deeply rooted in empathy, which enables people to shine and do their best work no matter their stage of career.”
— Rhiannon White, Chief Product Officer @ Vend by Lightspeed
“Ben's coaching is fantastic because he puts an emphasis on growing your own abilities, using established patterns, proven research, and his own wealth of knowledge.”
— Te Riu Warren, VP Engineering @ Vital
“Working with Ben helped all our leaders develop a humane, high performance culture which focussed on achieving our goals, but still understood the human factors behind that performance..”
— Michael Koziarski, CTO @ Vend by Lightspeed
Experience and background
I’m currently CTO at The Spinoff Group (thespinoff, Daylight Creative and Hexwork Productions), bringing a world-class technology & data approach to these already amazing media companies.
I’m also co-founder of New Zealand’s premier software development conference called Codemania (currently on semi-permanent Covid hiatus).
Previously…
Chief Experience Officer @ Westpac New Zealand
Modernising the approach to software engineering, implementing significant cultural change, and working with senior executives and board on resilience engineering.
Chief Engineering Officer @ Vend HQ
Over seven years at Vend I built an incredibly effective engineering team who ultimately contributed to Vend's NZ$500m exit. As Chief Engineering Officer, I was involved in company strategy at the highest level, defining the goals for the company as part of the executive team, and liaising with the board on strategy, security, technical direction, and more.
I grew the engineering group from a handfull of startup engineers to a team of over 60, implementing multiple organisation and process changes along the way. I've guided the team in migrating from bare-metal hosting in Rackspace to a micro-service architecture in AWS with hundreds of deploys per week, and implemented a strong culture of trust and accountability.
At Vend I modeled the software engineering capability not on our global competitors or local companies, but on world-class engineering teams including those at Netflix, Apple and Slack; tapping my networks to have conversations and learn which principles and processes we should adopt (or adapt).