Making Project Management Not Suck w/ Zach Ozer of Clubhouse

**Dan** (0:02)
It's time for us to start consolidating the data between project management tools and the actual development progress being made in your Git system. It's time for project management not to suck anymore.
I'm so excited for today's episode because I brought in Zach Ozer, the VP of Engineering at clubhouse.io, to talk about how the new partnership between LinearB's Software Delivery Intelligence Platform and Clubhouse Project Management is helping dev teams eliminate the need for status update meetings and automate the manual tasks so many project management tools require from developers.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:44)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity.
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**Dan** (0:59)
Zach, thanks for joining us.

**Zach Ozer** (1:01)
Yeah, of course, Dan. Thanks for inviting me to do this. I'm really excited.

**Dan** (1:05)
Me too. So awesome to have you on the show this week. We have some great announcements that we're gonna get into during the pod, but I wanted to kick us off with something that I've been hearing and kind of heard my whole career from the development community. And it sounds something like this.
I'm a developer and I don't really get value from my project management tool. Or even worse, my project management tool puts more pain onto me than I receive goodness from it. So I have to ask you, is project management broken or is this just the reality?

**Zach Ozer** (1:51)
Yeah, I mean, way to ask the hard questions right at the upfront, Dan. I mean, you're really not holding any punches.
You know, I don't think project management itself is a field of study or is a field of things that one needs to do is fundamentally broken, right? Like, I think you can look at a lot of good examples of ways that project and production management have made life better for everyone. The most famous example is probably being like Toyota's infamous production line, Kanban, infinite improvement type of things brought us cars that like, it used to be you got in your car and it broke down every day. It wasn't uncommon for someone to say, hey, I'm gonna be late to work, like my car broke down. And now you just don't hear that anymore, right?
I think it's no different from where we are. That's no different from where we are today with development teams, right? Today, you go in, a lot of teams struggle with their processes, right? Projects are late, quality is unreliable.
You see all sorts of things happening where the software that gets shipped is not what people want. And I think it's a reflection of the fact that people are still learning to work with the tools and learning to build their processes out. And obviously at Clubhouse, we're trying to change how people do that. I won't name any competitors or other tools. I'm not big into bad mouthing others, but part of what we strive for at Clubhouse is to make the process easier for developers to integrate with the tools that you're already using so that your product manager doesn't come over to you or project manager come over to you and tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, where can I see this ticket? What's the status? The idea is you committed code, you pushed it up for review, your peers reviewed it, it got merged, it got deployed. It should all happen behind the scenes. You're doing the work that you need to do and no one should be bugging you for status updates where the status already exists in some other system.

**Dan** (3:49)
Well, maybe that's what it is, right? Without mentioning another competitor or any competitors, a lot of us who have been in the industry for many, many years, 20 plus years, we're kind of used to those status update meetings, right? Okay, project manager, PM, product owner comes to you as a developer, as a developer team and says, all right, let me get the update on ticket A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and an hour goes by and you're kind of as a developer like, what am I doing here? I just wasted an hour of my life.
And it seems like a lot of what you're doing at Clubhouse and certainly what we're doing at LinearB is kind of, you know, completely solving that problem for the community. And so, you know, what I've been really excited about this week is about announcing our new partnership between LinearB and Clubhouse. So I wanted to chat, you know, on why this partnership is so important for the development community.