Amazon Leadership Principles — Text Copy, July 2026
Verbatim text of Amazon’s sixteen Leadership Principles, archived from amazon.jobs in July 2026.
Mark Loves Tech
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dbt Labs: Our Values (Archived)
An archived copy of the dbt Labs company values and leadership principles, preserved from getdbt.com before the company's closure.
Grab: Our Values (Archived)
An archived copy of Grab's company values — the 4Hs — preserved from grab.careers.
MongoDB: Company Values (Archived)
An archived copy of MongoDB's company values, preserved from mongodb.com.
RAISE 2026, Paris: From Research to Reality: Why Open Source Is the Engine of AI
Mark moderates a panel at RAISE Summit 2026 on why open source is the engine of AI innovation, with Ion Stoica, Thomas Wolf, Dillon Rolnick, Eiso Kant, and Robin Rombach.
CTO Confessions — What I Got Right (and Wrong) About Team Building (Techsylvania 2025)
In this talk, I focused on what works for teams and what doesn’t. How to know what a good team is, whether you’re on one, and if you’re not, whether you should try to be part of the solution - or exit the team gracefully.
Making Good Decisions via Memos and Meetings
A company succeeds or fails based on the speed and quality of the decisions it makes. Slides hide weaknesses in reasoning; documents expose them. My guidelines for writing good memos, the key questions for each meeting type, and how to run a meeting that ends in a decision instead of a follow-up. Licensed Apache 2.0.
How to Run an Incubation Process
A pro forma process for incubating new ideas alongside the regular flow of a product engineering org. Four phases — research, ideation, incubation, productization — with three decision gates between them. Drawn from variations I’ve used at NASA, Oracle, NewsCorp, Grab, MongoDB, and dbt Labs.
The 5Ds: Discover, Debate, Decide, Declare, Deliver
A working framework for thinking about every decision in five distinct phases. Originally a scratchpad I wrote as CTO at dbt Labs while thinking out loud about how to make and communicate decisions better — sharing here as a work in progress.
The Motive of Leadership
On Patrick Lencioni’s The Motive : rewards-based leadership vs. value/team-based leadership, and why senior leaders never change because they’re told to — only because they change what they value. Originally a note to my engineering managers.
The Six Levels of an Engineering Manager Career — and Why They Matter
A framework for understanding the fundamentally different jobs at each rung of the engineering leadership ladder — IC, Manager, Director, VP, C-Level, and CEO. Being promoted isn’t doing your current job better; it’s a new job with new skills, new mindsets, new success criteria, and new failure modes.
When a Rating Isn't Enough — My Dimensions of a Leader
A single-dimensional performance rating loses a huge amount of information about most humans. Eight dimensions I factor in when looking at leaders — and why lack of self-awareness about where you stand on them trumps all of them, and is a criteria for exit at director-and-above levels.
The Six Stages of Change — A Framework
Sometimes people need to change to adapt to the company, and we’re not sure of the journey or how to help them. Six levels from unaware-of-the-gap to changed-and-maintaining — and a warning about the 3-4-5-3-4-5 cycle that can fool you into thinking someone has actually changed.
Reorgs — Some Thoughts
Reorganizations are hardly ever viewed as positive by the troops. As a leader you’ve been sitting with the new structure for weeks; for everyone else, it lands as a surprise. The job isn’t moving boxes — it’s running the announcement like a well-orchestrated Broadway play, where the unpopular things are called out as the plot, not ignored.
LIFE Metrics — A Way of Thinking Deeper About Customer Experience of Availability
Fleet uptime is a fine starting point, but it doesn’t represent the customer experience. The LIFE framework — Length, Impact, Frequency, Experience — is how I think about availability NFRs in a way that actually maps to what customers feel.
Cascading — A Key Part of Being a Leader
Cascading isn’t just forwarding emails. It’s the practice — and discipline — of synthesizing, filtering, editorializing, and sometimes deleting the information that comes at you as a leader, then deciding what your team needs to know and how they need to know it. Originally written as a leveling note for my direct reports.
Bits to Bytes: Forging a Successful Career in Tech (Techsylvania 2023)
In this talk, I work to empower people to manage their own careers and give pointers from my own limited experience on things that work and things that don’t. Everybody’s journey is different…hopefully mine and what I learned from it are useful to you.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — by Patrick Lencioni — Mark's Notes
Highlights from Mark’s March 2023 reading of Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.
An Open Letter on Culture to Product and Engineering Organizations
Eight cultural guidelines for product and engineering organizations, written during my 18 months as CTO at MongoDB. Topics: balancing non-functional requirements with features, treating tech debt as a choice, pride in your work, trust, Conway’s law, Dunbar’s number, experimentation, candor and context for accountability, and avoiding unnecessary approvals.
How to Stay Competitive and Flexible in a Multi-Cloud World… and How Not To
An argument against the false fairy-tale of cloud-agnostic abstractions. Why letting the workload dictate the cloud, taking advantage of best-in-class services where you can, and focusing teams on being great on every environment they deploy to beats commoditizing yourself across the lowest common denominator. From conversations with many CTOs during my time at MongoDB.
My MongoDB World 2022 Presentations
Three talks I gave at the MongoDB World 2022 Builder’s Fest in New York City — slide decks below.
Proposed Leadership Principles from Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, June 2021
Thirteen leadership principles from a leader I admire — included here in their original framing as a reference for the parent Leadership Principles page.
From Started-Up to Scaled-Up (Techsylvania 2022)
For my first-ever Techsylvania talk, I talked about the challenges in culture and operations that occur as companies grow. I compared the culture of 4 companies in the talk, as well as some of the ways that our human minds work that make getting along easier and harder.
AWS had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day on Dec 7th, 2021. What happens next?
Mark's thoughts on the AWS Service Outage of Dec 7, 2021 -- examining AWS's response during and after the outage, plus implications for affected customers.
AWS DocumentDB Not MongoDB-Compatible, Says MongoDB Inc
MongoDB CTO Mark Porter contests AWS's characterization of DocumentDB as 'MongoDB compatible'
No Rules Rules — by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer — Mark's Notes
Highlights from No Rules Rules on Netflix’s culture of freedom and responsibility — talent density, candor, removing controls, and leading with context instead of process.
The Effective Executive — by Peter Drucker — Mark's Notes
Highlights from Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive — the five habits of effectiveness, managing time, focusing on contribution, building on strengths, and concentration.
A Single Prioritized Backlog
About 70% Clay Christensen, 30% me. The case against balancing work and home as two separate budgets — and for integrating them into one prioritized list for your whole life. Licensed Apache 2.0 so others can adopt it.
Never Split The Difference — Mark's Notes
Highlights from Chris Voss’s Never Split The Difference — mirroring, labeling, calibrated questions, and the illusion of control. Mark’s commentary in italics.
Extreme Ownership — by Jocko Willink — Mark's Notes
Highlights from Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership — on standards, Decentralized Command, Cover and Move, and the Dichotomy of Leadership.
Why Did I Come to MongoDB?
People ask me this often enough that I decided to put it on my home page: Aren't you one of the SQL folks? Why would one of you join MongoDB?
3Blue1Brown's Deep Learning Series — Seven Chapters That Actually Explain Neural Networks
Grant Sanderson’s seven-chapter visual walkthrough of neural networks, from the basics through transformers and how LLMs might store facts. The single best resource I’ve found for understanding what’s actually happening inside modern AI.
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Mark's User Manual V0.7*
How to work with Mark Porter — a guide to my API
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Tools and techniques Mark uses to stay productive
Tech and Career History
A first-person trip through every tech I touched — from a 4K TRS-80 to running databases at planetary scale.
Oracle Media Server: Providing Consumer Based Interactive Access to Multimedia Data
ACM SIGMOD '94 paper on the Oracle Media Server platform for distributed multimedia access