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Ben Kuhn

ben-kuhnanthropicwaveengineeringleadershipproject-management

Ben Kuhn

Ben Kuhn is an engineer and engineering leader who has worked at Wave (mobile money platform serving West Africa) and Anthropic. He writes prolifically on engineering leadership, project management, and what separates high-impact individual contributors from average ones. His essays are unusually concrete — grounded in specific numbers, real tradeoffs, and examples from his own work rather than abstract principles.

He is one of the most-ingested authors in this wiki, with 4 essays covering complementary angles of the same core question: what does it actually look like to do high-leverage technical work?

Core themes across his essays

Speed as respect and signal — moving fast is not just efficiency; it signals that you take other people's time seriously. Impatience compresses feedback loops: the difference between 1-hour and 1-week iteration cycles is not 168× productivity, it's qualitatively different kinds of work becoming possible. See be-impatient.

Impact through leverage, not hours — the bottleneck to impact is rarely effort. It is leverage: choosing the right problem, building the right tooling, being in the right information flow. Agency (making things happen) and taste (knowing what's worth doing) are the two components that separate high-leverage contributors. See impact-agency-and-taste.

Project management as information processing — large projects fail not from insufficient effort but from insufficient information flow. The OODA loop for projects means maintaining a fast round-trip between open questions and decisions. The Plan for Victory is an early-warning system, not optimism. See ooda-loop-for-projects and plan-for-victory.

Leadership is four separable jobs — direction, people, project, and technical leadership cluster differently in different people. Trying to hire one person who is great at all four is a unicorn hunt. Real org design means knowing which splits are viable. See categories-of-technical-leadership.

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