In this episode of the DevReady Podcast, host Anthony Sapountzis interviews Bill Lennan, Founder of 40 Percent Better, on how communication, coaching and business first engineering drive real outcomes, including 40 percent team turnarounds. Bill unpacks practical tactics to prioritise the right problems, align stakeholders and win executive buy in, from tiny habits that help engineers speak up to tailored pitches that secure budget for tools and training. He explains why cross functional discovery with sales and support beats the telephone game, how side projects accelerate learning and how giving teams ownership improves delivery and morale. Listeners will take away a clear, teachable framework for happier, higher performing engineering teams that build the right product faster.
Bill charts a 30-year journey in Silicon Valley, moving from cold-call sales into engineering at 32 and shipping code within six months. His guiding principle is simple and powerful: prioritise the business problem over the tech stack. Drawing on a coaching culture from fine-dining, he shows how peer coaching across the team lifts happiness and output and why hiring for problem-solving and design thinking outperforms chasing specific frameworks.
Anthony and Bill explore how passion and side projects compound learning, with insights from documentaries and other fields often sparking better solutions. Bill openly shares how he overcame severe social anxiety using tiny, incremental habits, then taught the same method to hundreds. The message is clear: communication is a core engineering skill. Silent brilliance stalls careers; great products emerge when engineers collaborate, verbalise ideas and contribute beyond code.
To build better products, Bill advocates back-channel conversations across the organisation, from sales to support, to collect unfiltered signals that rarely travel cleanly through layers of management. By socialising ideas early, incorporating feedback and building allies, he secures executive buy-in and genuine team ownership. Even inside large silos, deliberate outreach across regions surfaces the right inputs faster than waiting for the chain of command, while Agile administration remains light enough to leave time for this essential discovery work.
Anthony outlines the DevReady philosophy: understand the business, solve root causes rather than symptoms and agree value before touching code. Bill agrees that upfront homework matters, yet he also shares a green-field story where scrappy prototyping proved value quickly, from an early “snow cam” on dial-up to real-world social proof at ski resorts. His turnaround playbook combines upgraded mental models, emotional resilience to take high-leverage actions and tailored communication that speaks to each audience’s success metrics. The result is teams that win budget, choose impactful projects, systematise habits and sustain performance improvements, including a 40% lift in throughput in just six months.
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