Category Archives: Organization & People

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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment

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
Leave a comment

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
Leave a comment

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
Leave a comment

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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment
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 →

No Starving Children? The Shocking Truth About Prioritization.

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

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
Leave a comment

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 →

Engineer the Sh*t out of Errors – Everywhere

May 30, 2023
Amazon Way, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups, Technology & Execution
Leave a comment

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 →

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
Leave a comment

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
Leave a comment
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
Leave a comment

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 →

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 →

Dive Deep != Micromanaging

March 28, 2019
Amazon Way, Leadership, Organization & People
1 Comment
BMW E28 Seat Gearbox Detail

You’ve said it. You’ve heard others say it. You are not quite sure how you feel about it. “So-and-so is a micro-manager. He/she’s always in my shorts and doesn’t let me just do my job.” This week’s Amazon Leadership Principle tip may help you navigate this common meme more effectively. The following has been my pinned tweet for the past year: “The more details you know, the better questions you can ask. The better questions …Continue reading →

Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

March 13, 2019
Amazon Way, Business, Customer & Product, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution
Leave a comment
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 →

Ownership

May 27, 2018
Amazon Way, Books, Leadership, Organization & People
Leave a comment

Organizations thrive when leaders think like owners—not just of their teams, but of the whole company and its customers. Yet, many mistake ownership for simply crushing their individual goals. How can you encourage true ownership culture without fostering silos? Amazon’s definition tries to make this tension apparent by explicitly stating ownership is broader than themselves or their team: Ownership – Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. …Continue reading →