Approximately
North
Practical ideas for translating strategy into execution as startups and engineering organizations scale.
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Why Approximately North? A sailboat cannot travel straight into the wind. It has to tack, changing course without losing direction. Teams navigating growth and change do the same.
Essays
Field notes on building, leading, and choosing the next useful move.
Go Direct Without Summoning the Eye of Sauron
How to remove communication bottlenecks without turning every engineer into a help desk.
Approximately North: Changing Course Without Losing Direction
What a sailboat tacking into the wind can teach teams and startups about strategy, execution, scale, and AI.
Get out of the Loop
Agents should build and tend deterministic systems—not improvise forever in the production path.
Every Major Infrastructure Shift Looks Different—Until It Doesn’t
Technologies change, but the organizational patterns around consequential platform bets repeat.
Writing Things Down
Writing is infrastructure for asynchronous thinking, alignment, decisions, and organizational memory.
Taking Control of Performance Feedback
A practical system for making career growth continuous instead of waiting for the annual review.
Finding the Mythical 10x Engineer
The real multiplier is an engineer who makes the whole team faster, clearer, and more capable.
Understand the Buyer, Not Just the Product
Enterprise buying decisions belong to a network of people with distinct motivations and constraints.
Build Pyramids, Not Arches
Every layer should be useful now, support the next layer, and leave room for the final shape to change.
About
Approximately North is a developing collection of essays about the mechanisms that turn strategy into repeated behavior and results.
Kiran Bondalapati is an engineering leader who has built and scaled products, platforms, teams, and organizations across startups and large technology companies. These essays draw on that operating experience and are being shaped into a more useful, readable collection.