Deliver Better Results: How to Unlock Your Organization's Potential | Gil Broza

**Gil Broza** (0:00)
If our listeners take something away from this, is again, look beyond your immediate scope, right? If you just try to improve engineering or just try to improve product, or you let teams do their own like retros and continuous improvement and whatnot, you run the risk of things not really sticking, the changes don't stick, or you get unintended consequences, or you just get too much business risk.
You want to understand the boundaries, you want to have this coalition of leaders who care about the system and want to improve it.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
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**Dan Lines** (1:04)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, Linear B COO and co-founder, and today I'm joined by Gil Broza, author of the book Deliver Better Results.
Welcome to the show, Gil.

**Gil Broza** (1:24)
Thank you so much for having me here.

**Dan Lines** (1:26)
It's really cool having you on, and we were just chatting before the show. You're in Toronto. I'm in Rochester, New York. We're actually pretty close to each other, not too far away, which is awesome. Usually I can't say that for people that are coming on the show, but I have seen actually a lot of good stuff happening in Toronto.
Some startup companies, that type of thing, which is really cool. So awesome to have you on.
Could we start out? We know that you wrote this incredible book. We're going to get into the book. But can we hear a little bit about you, your background, what you're all about, your career, and then we'll dive into the book.

**Gil Broza** (2:06)
I have been specializing for the past 20 years in helping software leaders deliver better results, hence the name for the book. And they do that by upgrading their organization's way of working, and they achieve sustainable upgrades to their way of working because we work on the three pillars of effective product development, thinking in systems, putting people first, and being intentional about mindset. Like I said, it's been about 20 years. I'm pretty well known in the agile space. I've worked with about 100 clients since starting my independent practice 15 years ago.
And I work primarily with, you know, US., Canada, and Europe, but I want to help the entire world.

**Dan Lines** (2:51)
So 15 years ago, you started, you said like independent practice, but like your own business.

**Gil Broza** (2:58)
Yes, which is intentionally unaffiliated, non-certifying, giving my clients the best that they deserve, and not just somebody else's ideas.

**Dan Lines** (3:10)
Very cool. And what did you do before that, previous to the 15 years ago, you start your independent business? What happened before that?

**Gil Broza** (3:19)
Pretty common engineering track. I started as a developer, senior developer, team lead, R&D manager.
And it was around that time that I discovered Agile methods. I was able, so we're talking about like 2000, 2001, I was able to apply them in a couple of companies. And it's then when I realized, I want to help more and more companies rather than stay within the confines of one.

**Dan Lines** (3:45)
Gotcha. Yeah. So, early 2000s, lots of companies, I think, maybe thinking, well, I mean, that may be even the time frame where it's like, Agile is a little newer, like how do I do this? And then, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so you kind of said, okay, let me go and make this a career for myself, but I can help many, many people. That's what it sounds like.

**Gil Broza** (4:14)
Yes, because the realization was that how we work matters. And for the longest time, we had just one way of getting work done, right? The traditional kind of project management approach.
And I sort of happened upon this alternate reality where teams can be collaborative and cross-functional and planning frequently and managers don't have to be bossy. And I was, you know, there's a lot here and I want to help others.

**Dan Lines** (4:41)
Yeah, that's a ton. And we're going to have to unpack all of this stuff.

**Gil Broza** (4:45)
Exactly.

**Dan Lines** (4:46)