Geeky Leadership Rants by Tig Kindel
These are the tenets for Principal Engineers that define the engineering culture at Amazon. They are just about as perfect as a set of rules that define senior engineers’ behaviors as you’ll find. Ensuring your company’s … Read more
In 1938, P.G. Wodehouse wrote this in The Code of the Woosters: He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. … Read more
This week the argument found a name. Uncle Bob Martin, who started coding in the late 60s and wrote the book on clean code, posted that his current strategy is to not read any of the … Read more
Software engineers stopped opening IDEs. Hardware engineers are about to stop opening KiCad. I define Prompt to Metal, explain why the prompt-box startups have no moat, and share five weakly held opinions about where this all goes.
Updated July 2026. The original March version of this post is below, revised. The biggest changes: my credentials for giving this advice got stronger (I stopped reading the code entirely; see No-Look Coding and the Five Stages … Read more
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 … Read more
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.
You don’t scale excellence by inspecting outcomes—you scale it by designing systems that send the right signals. These are called Fitness Functions.
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.
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.
Organizational Silos Are Like Gravity. You Don’t Hope Them Away. You can’t culture-doc them into nonexistence. You Engineer Around Them.
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 … Read more
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, … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
