Building a High-Performing Leadership Team: Lessons from The Advantage

***Note the date/time/venue change - now Tues 29 Apr 5.30pm at Auror!***

Welcome to our next event! You might have noticed something looks slightly different - we're now the Auckland Product and Software Leaders Group, reflecting the fact that our talk topics are useful to both product and tech leaders. This event includes an amazing talk from Niels Grootscholten - Senior Director of Software Engineering at Henry Schein One.

Great software organizations don’t just emerge from technical excellence—they are built on strong leadership, trust, and alignment. In this session, Niels Grootscholten shares his personal journey of transforming a leadership team using the framework and principles from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage.

Drawing from real-world experience, Niels will discuss the practical steps he took to foster a culture of trust, create organizational clarity, and drive high performance. He’ll highlight the challenges, key insights, and tangible results that emerged from applying Lencioni’s approach to product and engineering leadership.

About our speaker:
Niels Grootscholten is an experienced product and technology leader with a track record in building high-performing software organizations. Currently, as Senior Director of Software Engineering at Henry Schein One, Niels is passionate about cultivating strong leadership teams and scaling engineering excellence in the healthcare technology space.

With a diverse career spanning both product and software engineering leadership, Niels has led teams across various industries. He previously served as Chief Product Officer at Janison, where he spearheaded the ground-up development of its next-generation online assessment and learning platform. Earlier in his career, he led a software development team at the Royal New Zealand Navy, driving software and technology initiatives in a complex information environment.

Food & Drinks
As usual - we'll provide the pizza and drinks :)

VENUE: Note that this event will be hosted at the new Auror office in Britomart rather than our usual venue at Microsoft!

DATE: There has also been a date change. This event is running on Tuesday 29th April 2025. Previously this event was scheduled for 1-May-2025. We'll be starting the event with networking from 5.30pm to give those who have meetings ending at 5pm a chance to get there.