Meet Peter Goodman, VP of Engineering at Auror. In this post, Peter shares why he chose to join Auror, what he’s observed in his time here so far, and what he’s most excited for in the next phase of scaling.

Why did you choose to join Auror and what have you observed about the culture here?

Since moving to New Zealand 16 years ago, I have fallen in love with the place. I have come to believe strongly in the late Sir Paul Callaghan’s vision that the future here will depend on innovative companies making a large impact on the world stage. Auror is a shining example of the potential that kiwis have to make precisely this kind of impact and I wanted to be a part of that story.

During my interview process I realised that every single person I talked to was someone I wanted to work with. I had heard a lot about the culture and knew from experience that in order to succeed in its vision, Auror would need to be full of people that are driven, willing to challenge themselves, and support each other. I also knew that I’d find out in the first few months whether that was the case and whether I had made the right choice. Those months have come and gone. I’m still here and more confident than ever that Auror is going to continue making a global impact.

Why is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging important in building a great company and product?

Over the last few years, we’ve been deliberate in the way that we grow our teams – and DEIB is foundational to how we think about and develop a healthy team culture. Our current Engineering team is made up of 40% women and 60% men and there are 11+ different ethnicities represented in the team.

That being said, it’s important to recognise that diversity is only one piece of the puzzle. We know from research that the most critical factor in building successful teams is psychological safety. When our people feel safe in their working environment they are better able to do their best work. Blameless culture, thoughtful open communication, and representation in recruitment are incredibly important aspects to building a safe and inclusive environment. If we want to build software that has a positive impact for everyone in society, we should be deliberate in ensuring that our teams represent them.

As Auror grows and more people join the team, making decisions and getting consensus can take longer. What is your view on keeping up with momentum while seeking consensus?

As the team grows into many teams, you find that each of these small decisions are taking longer to make. You start to see that the team is spending more time discussing and debating these small decisions and you start to wonder if you should be doing something about it.

The thing that tends to happen at this point is that consensus has become the order of the day. There is this weird belief that consensus is a great thing to have in a group of people. I guess it is, but it only happens if the group is very, very small. Why? Because instances of consensus trend towards zero as the size of the group increases.

This is why many teams have discovered an alternative approach – invert the problem and instead of chasing consensus, look for dissent. If you look at the Netflix Culture and Valued Behaviours you will find this resonates with their behaviour of Informed Captains:

“For every significant decision, we identify an informed captain of the ship who is an expert in their area. They are responsible for listening to other views and then making a judgement call on the right way forward. We avoid decisions by committee, which would slow us down and diffuse responsibility.”

“On big strategic issues, the captain farms for dissent and other alternatives to ensure they are truly informed. Dissent can be difficult, which is why we make an effort to stimulate discussion. We don’t wait for consensus or vote by committee, nor do we drive to rapid, uninformed decision making. The bigger the decision, the more extensive the debate. Afterwards, as the impact becomes clearer, we reflect on the decision and see how we could do even better in the future.”

I believe that coaching people on how to seek out, rather than avoid, conflicting opinions is a better, safer way to move at speed than optimising for consensus.

One of the things that the Engineering team at Auror are known for is deploying multiple times a day. Why is this effective and how does this benefit the team?

In my early days as an Engineer, I used to write a bunch of code on my machine, add to it, add more, refactor, add more, test it, clean it up, write tests (whoops), double check it, triple check it, then eventually let someone else see it when I knew it was safe for me to do so. I was optimising for never being wrong, not learning to improve. I built up so much stress during this process that it was a rollercoaster of fear and insecurity.

The benefit with smaller pull requests is that code reviews are quick and easy. More tests are automated. QEs are able to focus on what matters. Product and UX can provide timely feedback. Course corrections happen earlier before wasted effort. Incident impacts are smaller and downtime is shorter because when things go wrong in production it’s easy to see what changed. We do fewer revolutions, big refactorings, and rewrites. Long-lived feature branches and merge-conflict resolutions are a thing of the past. In short, we focus on continually providing value, learning from how our customers use our software and responding to their changing needs.

We hear that you’re growing the Engineering leadership team and hiring for a Director of Engineering. Why this role and how does this role contribute to the next phase of scaling for Auror?

As we add more teams at Auror, the role of Director becomes a critical enabler to make sure that our teams are heard and have what they need to focus on doing their best work. The mix of execution and strategy at the Director level is where the day-to-day, week-to-week cadence of individual teams meets the vision of the company. And hence it is where that impact we talked about really comes into focus.

I know this person will play a critical role in building a safe, inclusive environment, empowering teams, and helping connect what they do every week to the impact they have for our customers.

Learn more about the Director of Engineering role.

View all open roles: auror.co/company-careers