Three books.
One through line.
Diagnose the dysfunction, understand what went wrong, and fix it — for good. The series takes leaders from awareness to action.
Sanity at Scale
How Engineering Leaders Move from Heroic Firefighting to Systemic Excellence
Your team is busy. Your backlog is full. And somehow, nothing important is getting done. Sanity at Scale is the no-nonsense manual for leaders who are done pretending more process is the answer.
Drawing on high-consequence failure prevention protocols and two decades of scaling organizations, Dave delivers a blueprint for leaders who want to stop being the hero — and start building systems that work without them.
"This is not a fluffy, touchy-feely book. It is a manual for industrial execution. It cuts through the noise of Agile buzzwords and snowflake nonsense." — Luiz "Q" Quintela, Raskere
- The Hero Trap — why your best people are hiding your broken processes
- Radical Simplification — the Backlog Bankruptcy protocol
- The Myth of "High, Medium, Low" — and what actually works
- The Art of the Hard No — protecting focus in a world of yes
- The Sustainable Pace — a career you can survive, a life you can enjoy
Who Killed Agile?
The autopsy of a failed transformation
Agile transformations fail all the time. The ceremonies get rolled out, the coaches get hired, the frameworks get installed — and two years later, the teams are more frustrated than before. Who Killed Agile? is the forensic look at why.
Dave Borzillo examines the most common causes of death: the wrong incentives, the wrong metrics, the wrong definition of done. And more importantly, what the organizations that actually get it right do differently.
- Why agile transformations fail even when everyone means well
- The most common killers — leadership theater, metric gaming, and framework cargo-culting
- What distinguishes teams that make it work from teams that don't
- How to diagnose your own transformation before it flatlines
United Agility
Uniting Product and Business Agility · A primer for the new. A mirror for the practiced.
Most agile transformations fail because product and business teams never truly align. United Agility is the primer — the book that lays the foundation for understanding what agile is actually supposed to do, and why the gap between teams doing agile and organizations being agile is where transformations die.
The second edition has been fully revised with new chapters on Business Agility, Value Stream Mapping, and OKRs — available free in PDF and ePub.
- What agile is — and what it was never meant to be
- Why uniting product and business agility is the only transformation that sticks
- The 12 agile principles organized around People, Delivery, Collaboration, and Improvement
- New in the 2nd Edition: Business Agility, VSM, and OKRs
Free because the ideas matter more than the revenue. Read it, share it, use it.
Read them in order. Or start where you are.
Each book stands alone — but together they take you from understanding agile to diagnosing what killed it to building systems that actually work at scale.
United Agility
The foundation. What agile is, why alignment matters, and how to close the gap between doing agile and being agile.
Who Killed Agile?
The autopsy. Why transformations fail and what the organizations that get it right do differently.
Sanity at Scale
The manual. How to move from heroic firefighting to systems that deliver without burning everyone out.