If you feel behind on AI, you probably are. The tools are improving faster than most teams are changing how they work. I see this daily in my coaching of individuals and teams in industries spanning medtech, space, consumer electronics, and even AI. The good news is that catching up doesn’t require a grand strategy, a transformation program, or perfect clarity. It requires a different posture; and a willingness to act before you feel ready. …Continue reading
For the past few months we’ve been architecting, refactoring, and refining. 146 commits. Dozens of PRs. One PR touched 493 files. The long-awaited Beta isn’t just about revolutionary features. It’s about getting the architecture right and ensuring the API is stable for the future. Terminal.Gui v2 is the ultimate framework for building cross-platform Terminal UI (TUI) apps with code that belongs in 2026, not 1999. Here’s the stuff I’m the most proud of. To learn …Continue reading
I’ve heard “program” used to mean everything from a team to a project plan to a portfolio to lines of code. At some point, someone has to stop and say: you keep using that word—I don’t think it means what you think it means. A shared Taxonomy and Lexicon essential for focus and execution. Without one, organizations descend into semantic chaos. Few places create more confusion than the “P” words: Pfunction, Program, Project, Product, and …Continue reading
Mechanisms are complete processes—owned by a leader, built around a tool or ritual, broadly adopted, and continually inspected and improved—that make the right behavior the default. Rather than hoping people do the right thing, great leaders engineer processes that guarantee it.Continue reading
You don’t scale excellence by inspecting outcomes—you scale it by designing systems that send the right signals. These are called Fitness Functions.Continue reading
The right kind of feedback can transform teams, while the wrong kind erodes trust and performance. SBI, which stands for Situation–Behavior–Impact, is a structured way to give feedback that’s clear, non-defensive, and actionable.Continue reading
Terminal.Gui is a .NET UI framework for cross-platform terminal apps. It started life as gui.cs, created by Miguel de Icaza. Miguel, being Miguel, casually dropped a complete cross-platform console UI stack into the world, made it just great enough to be dangerous, and moved on. I was submitting fixes to, and poking around in gui.cs, when Miguel became enamored with Swift. I asked him if I could take it over. I wanted the experience of …Continue reading
Here’s a simple yet powerful exercise, the CBTO Stack Rank, designed to force you into uncomfortable clarity about where you really stand as a leader.Continue reading
Organizational Silos Are Like Gravity. You Don’t Hope Them Away. You can’t culture-doc them into nonexistence. You Engineer Around Them.Continue reading
Every great org starts the same way: a handful of people with conviction, urgency, and the energy of a shared mission. The best ones are driven by clarity of purpose, crisp principles, and a team that believes in building something that matters. But then… something changes. Not all at once. Slowly. Subtly. A mood creeps in. That’s the ghost of mediocrity. It doesn’t smash the windows or light anything on fire. It just takes the …Continue reading
The Single-Threaded Leader (STL) model was born inside Amazon and became foundational to how we scaled and delivered customer-obsessed innovation—especially in the early years of Alexa. I wrote the original doc that helped crystalize the model, and it’s been gratifying to see how the idea has since echoed through other orgs, blog posts, and companies trying to scale impact without scaling chaos “The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s …Continue reading
There are three states a leader can be in relative to people management: 🔧 The Builder This is the Individual Contributor (IC) track. Builders go deep on the T, C, and B parts of Customer, Business, Technology, Organization: they write code, close deals, publish policy, and drive execution. Their leadership shows up through ownership, influence, and follow-through. Their product is what they ship. Builders can and should influence the entire company. This is why engineering …Continue reading
The first rule of skills is simple: know the skill exists. That sounds obvious, but most people—especially growing leaders—aren’t intentional about skills. They focus on outcomes. Goals. KPIs. But they don’t stop to ask: What specific skill am I building right now? What skill does this teammate need? When you’re intentional about skills, you grow faster. You get better at execution. And you help others do the same. This matters. Because leadership is a set …Continue reading
When an organization hits a wall—be it a product failing in the field, a critical project slipping off the rails, or a big customer walking away—the knee-jerk reaction is often to lean on the leaders already in place. After all, they’re the ones with the titles, the experience, and the authority, right? Wrong. Hard problems don’t care about org charts. Once you’ve got a grip on what’s broken, the real trick is finding the right …Continue reading
Let’s start with a simple question: What kind of work do you like doing? Go ahead, answer it in your head. I’ll wait. … Did you just describe what you like working on? Or who you like working with? Or maybe you veered into what you like accomplishing or who you like working for? If so, you’re not alone. Nine out of 10 leaders, when asked this question, end up answering a completely different one. Here’s the thing: the dictionary definition of “work” …Continue reading
This post introduces the concept of Working Backward (WB) narratives and formalizes the mechanism through which a company can drive product development. The WB mechanism is a complete process designed to create a “virtuous cycle” that re-enforces and improves itself as the team participates in it. “Put the customer first, have a plan, create a shared mission, get early victories, remove process, and make it fun.” – tig A WB narrative is a form of …Continue reading
Prioritization means making decisions that focus energy and resources on a few things that are at the top of the list, and starving things that are lower in the list. The most important aspect of prioritization is the concept of starvation. In the context of prioritization, starvation refers to the lack of attention or resources given to tasks lower down on the priority list. By definition, as we allocate more resources to higher-priority tasks, lower-priority tasks …Continue reading
The practice of selling ideas in meetings can lead to misalignment and superficial agreement. When the focus is on persuasion rather than understanding, team members may agree without fully grasping the implications or having their concerns addressed. This superficial agreement will lead to problems down the line when the complexities of the idea come to light during implementation. If the presenter’s goal is to get buy-in for an idea, dissenting voices may be silenced or …Continue reading
I was a guest on the “Are We There Yet?” podcast. We dove deep into several topics close to my heart: The future of life on Earth, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, leadership, and more. Have a listen and let me know your reaction! Legendary technologist, product visionary, and leadership coach Tigger (Charlie) Kindel winds through the challenges and choices his team made during the early development of Amazon’s Alexa; where AI fits in the continuum …Continue reading
In 35+ years of building companies and organizations in multiple industries, I’ve concluded most leadership books are great examples of survivorship bias. I’ve learned a lot from many of these books. But none of them really clued me into the secret of what distinguishes teams that consistently deliver outsized results from teams that are just mediocre. So what’s the secret? Principles. Principled leaders have a set of strongly held beliefs in the how (vs the …Continue reading
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