Stop Optimizing Your Tech Stack and Fix This Instead | Bill Lennan, Founder of 40% Better

Bill Lennan spent 25 years leading software teams in Silicon Valley, and he built a repeatable system that most executives completely overlook: optimizing your people stack.

In this episode, Bill breaks down the three pillars behind his 40% Better framework, intrinsic motivation, psychological safety, and high-leverage communication, and how they compound into measurable business outcomes.

We talk through a real case study where he took the worst-performing software team in a company and turned them into the best in six months, a 40% jump in coding throughput.

We also get into the true cost of employee churn, why beliefs and mental models are the actual starting point for team performance, and how he went from crippling social anxiety to writing the playbook on talking to strangers.

If you run a software business and you think culture is a soft metric, this episode will change your mind.