Category Archives: Customer & Product

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 →

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 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 →

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 →

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 →

From Servers, Phones, and Voice Assistants to Space…

February 23, 2021
Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Platforms, Skiing, Space, Technology & Execution
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Last week I joined my good friend  Den Delimarsky and his colleague Courtny Cotten hosted me on The Work Item podcast. “In this episode, we dive a bit deeper into Charlie’s approach to product ideation and design, discuss the importance of having a principled organization, and ask questions about his most recent adventure around space.” Czech it out here (I love that the transcript is available along with the audio): From Servers, Phones, and Voice Assistants to …Continue reading →

How to be a Secret Agent (of Change)

February 3, 2021
Amazon Way, Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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Seal of the United States Secret Service

Great leaders don’t let changes happen to them. Instead, they become skilled at driving change. Leaders effective in driving change are known as agents of change or change agents. This post documents a tool called D x V x F > R that will enable you to become a great agent of change.Continue reading →

Open Office Hours with Tig

December 22, 2020
Business, Career, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
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Last month I offered “office hours” to anyone who wanted to chat with me. It was an experiment to see a) if interesting people would reach out, b) if I could be useful to these people, and c) if I’d be exposed to domains where I could spend more of my time in the future. All three hypotheses have turned out true. Thank you to all of you who utilized this so far! I still …Continue reading →

Interview with Authority Mag: Homes Of The Future

October 6, 2020
Customer & Product, Kindel, Smart Home, Technology & Execution
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Jason Hartman recently interviewed me for Authority Magazine. Check it out. Homes Of The Future: “The Future Of Smart Homes” With Charlie Kindel of SnapAV Some quotes: One of the things that really motivates and drives me professionally and personally, is the idea of how technology can improve people’s lives in their homes… I realized then that I was doing it all wrong and that everybody around me was doing it wrong and that they …Continue reading →

Broken Windows – Right Idea, Bad Analogy

July 10, 2020
Customer & Product, Leadership, Technology & Execution
6 Comments

It is well understood that no product is perfect and small issues will always exist. Without an ongoing mechanism to fix those issues, not only do they not get fixed, they pile up. Having a clear Lexicon and Taxonomy is critical to getting large numbers of people moving forward towards a vision. Having the lexicon be composed of terms that make logical sense, disambiguate, and are memorable is important. Over the years of building many …Continue reading →

Mechanisms

March 6, 2020
Amazon Way, Business, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
3 Comments

Mechanisms are complete processes built around a tool, owned by a leader that gets adopted broadly and regularly inspected and improved to ensure things get done, not because everyone has good intentions, but because the mechanism’s elements structurally force the desired behavior. “Good intentions never work, you need good mechanisms to make anything happen.” — Jeff Bezos I’ve written previously about how Good Intentions are Never Enough and why mechanisms are needed, but I didn’t go deep into how to make mechanisms actually work. …Continue reading →

Work Backwards From The Customer

February 4, 2020
Amazon Way, Customer & Product, Leadership
7 Comments

At the 1996 Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) I stood up in front of 8,000 customers and announced what I’d been working on for the previous two years: the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). On stage, in front of all those people, we wrote and demoed code running on one Windows 95 PC talking over the network to code on other PCs. This was back in the day when being able to write programs that worked across a …Continue reading →

Focusing on users is not Customer Obsession

May 30, 2019
Amazon Way, Customer & Product, Leadership
1 Comment
https://www.flickr.com/photos/findrehabcenters

Let’s talk Customer Obsession and how it is different than user obsession. My definitions: Customer: An individual (or entity) that pays you, directly or indirectly, for value you provide. User: An individual that is forced to use something you provide. Users fall into three buckets 1) people unhealthily addicted to something (heroin), 2) employees forced to use something in order to do their job (IT systems), or 3) people who are products of services that sell them …Continue reading →

Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

March 13, 2019
Amazon Way, Business, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
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Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/genista/

Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. – Amazon’s Leadership Principles This Leadership Principle actually combines two principles that go hand-in-hand. First, there’s the “Have Backbone” part and then the part about disagreeing but committing …Continue reading →

Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)

April 21, 2018
Business, Career, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
6 Comments

CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + OrganizationContinue reading →

What it Means to Be Great Product Manager

June 18, 2015
Customer & Product, Leadership
1 Comment

A Tweetstorm of mine from earlier in the week: https://twitter.com/natbro/timelines/611337333711843330 Piling on a comment @natbro made about PMs: Besides customers, there are two groups of people involved in building tech products: Engineers and everyone else. Only the engineers actually produce anything for the customer. The job of everyone else, especially PMs is to generate clarity and commitment to a purpose so that the engineers can create magic. Bad PMs don’t get this and think the …Continue reading →

"Write Once…" is Anti-Customer

February 21, 2013
Customer & Product, Mobile, Platforms, Technology & Execution
23 Comments
The father of WORA: James Gosling

Just as in the ’90s, there’s a bunch of hype these days around solving the cross-platform development problem. Mobile platform fragmentation is killing developers, and if only every device supported some common language or technology engine we could all Write Once and Run Anywhere. If only. WORA was, is, and always will be, a fallacy. WORA reminds me of the mole in whack-a-mole. It just keeps popping up and the realities of competing platform vendors …Continue reading →

Why Nobody Can Copy Apple

February 19, 2013
Business, Customer & Product, Platforms
128 Comments

Horace Dediu has written another brilliant piece titled “Why doesn’t anybody copy Apple?”. As he points out, Apple is fairly unique in its command of vertical integration and many people point to that as the “why”. However, Horace also admits this can’t be the sole reason and he is unable to explain what that reason could be. I think I know. Tim Cook refers to integration and a great team as unique Apple advantages (but …Continue reading →

A Mouse and Keyboard Don’t Make a Hardware Company

July 25, 2012
Business, Customer & Product
47 Comments

Microsoft is not, and never will be, a hardware company. Please don’t go off saying “what about Xbox or mice & keyboards?” Microsoft does not really want to build & sell hardware. Surface is akin to Google’s Nexus; a ‘north star’ product intended to lead OEMs in the right direction. “With Surface we wanted to make sure that no stone is left unturned, in terms of really showing Windows 8 in its most innovative form. …Continue reading →