Your Leadership Priorities Are Probably Backwards (And How to Fix Them)

May 8, 2025
Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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CBTO Stack Rank

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 →

Your Org Is Sinking in Silo Gravity. Build a Damn Rocket

May 1, 2025
Leadership, Organization & People
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Silos are like gravity. You don’t fight gravity with good intentions. You fight it with engineering.

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 →

Exorcise the Ghost of Mediocrity

April 14, 2025
Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People
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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 →

How We Scaled Alexa: One Problem, One Leader

April 14, 2025
Amazon Way, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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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 →

People Management Is Not a Hobby

April 10, 2025
Business, Leadership, Organization & People
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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

April 8, 2025
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People
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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 →

Send in the Wolfes: Why Hard Problems Need Fixers, Not Just Leaders

March 27, 2025
Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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The Wolfe

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 →

Stop Answering the Wrong Question: Unlock Your True Work Happiness

February 5, 2025
Career, Leadership, Organization & People
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Work: It's either grueling or joyful.

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 →

How To: Write a Working Backwards Doc

July 23, 2024
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Writing
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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 →

No Starving Children? The Shocking Truth About Prioritization.

June 6, 2024
Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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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 →

Don’t Sell Ideas – Debate Them

December 17, 2023
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Writing
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Narrative Style Meeting

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 →

How AI Will Keep Us Honest

November 16, 2023
Career, Leadership, Space, Writing
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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 →

The Secret to Delivering Outsized Results

October 24, 2023
Amazon Way, Clarity of Thought, Leadership
2 Comments
Survivorship-bias

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 →

Announcing Kindel Leadership Development

July 21, 2023
Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Space, Startups, Technology & Execution
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In 2020 started hosting my Free and Open Office Hours as a way to give back and meet more people in the space industry. As I became useful to those in the space industry and gained expertise in the space domain I discovered how fulfilling helping multiple companies with leadership and operational excellence was. To that end, I have pivoted and made Kindel Leadership Development my primary focus. Hire me for Learn more and get …Continue reading →

cek.log -> tig.log (Charlie -> Tigger)

June 9, 2023
Uncategorized
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Tigger

When I was a baby my favorite eldest sister nicknamed me “Tigger” because I was bouncy and acting “Tiggerish”. Friends and family have called me “Tigger” or “Tig” ever since. When I started my professional career I figured the goofy nickname wasn’t appropriate, so decided on Charlie. After 30+ years of not loving being called “Charlie”, I’ve decided to reclaim Tigger as my name. In the earliest days of email, I signed my emails “-tig”. …Continue reading →

Biases and Fallacies Lead to Smol Thinking

June 2, 2023
Clarity of Thought, Leadership
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All human beings are prone to cognitive biases and fallacies that influence our thinking and decision-making processes. These biases and fallacies can be sneaky and hard to detect, but it’s important that we are aware of them and try to minimize their impact on our lives. By being mindful of our biases, we can expand our thinking and consider new perspectives and possibilities. One way to do this is by looking beyond our own planet …Continue reading →

Engineer the Sh*t out of Errors – Everywhere

May 30, 2023
Amazon Way, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
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Errors. They’re everywhere, but they don’t have to spell disaster. In fact, they’re an opportunity for improvement, if you Engineer the Sh*it out of them. By everywhere, I mean in all functions of a company, not just product or operations. A hallmark of a world-class organization is a mechanism that treats errors as they should be: imperfections in the systems or processes, not personal failings. One of the most famous is Amazon’s Correction of Errors …Continue reading →

Make the Routine, Routine – Blow up Dunbar’s Number

April 2, 2023
Business, Clarity of Thought, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
2 Comments

As fast-growing organizations approach Dumbar’s number, they either become forever mediocre or they adapt and become excellent at scaling (in addition to being excellent at delivering customer value). The key differentiator is making the routine, routine by implementing cadence-based mechanisms, which I call Routines.Continue reading →

Breaking Down Innovation & Invention

January 8, 2023
Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
6 Comments

A friend recently asked me if I had a Lexicon & Taxonomy for Innovation and Invention. While I do, I realized I’ve never written it down. Here’s my first stab; using the Customer, Business, Organization, and Technology (CBTO) mental model. What do you think? Lexicon: Taxonomy: This lexicon and taxonomy of innovation and invention provide a mental model for understanding and categorizing different types of innovative ideas and approaches. However, simply having innovative ideas is …Continue reading →

Why Mars? For the Dogs!

January 4, 2023
Space
1 Comment

Mars has long captivated the human imagination as a potential destination for exploration and settlement. With its rugged terrain and extreme conditions, Mars presents a unique challenge and an exciting opportunity for humanity. There are several reasons why we should colonize Mars. First and foremost, it would allow us to extend our reach beyond Earth and become a multi-planetary species. This would not only be an exciting and ambitious goal, but it would also provide …Continue reading →