The lessons that made me a better leader kept slipping away.

How I got here

From writing code to leading the people who write it.

I started as a frontend developer in 2012 and spent close to a decade as an engineer, moving from frontend work into senior and lead roles. That kind of knowledge sticks, because you use it every single day. You write the code, you hit the bug, you fix it, and the lesson is burned in by a repetition you do not even notice you are doing.

Then I moved into leadership. First a single team, then a chapter of engineers, then other leaders, and today a cluster of teams serving corporate customers across the Nordics. The knowledge that matters at each step is different: how to give feedback that actually lands, how to read a teammate who is quietly checking out, how to make a call with half the information. Unlike code, you do not practice it daily. You reach for it in a hard 1:1, a reorg, a promotion case: rare, high stakes, and easy to get wrong.

And looking back, the real accelerant of my career was rarely more engineering. It was understanding what happened outside it: how sales actually wins a deal, why finance freezes a budget, what a launch means to marketing, what the board is afraid of this quarter. Every step up was really a step across, into someone else’s world, learning enough of it to translate. Nobody teaches that job and you cannot practice it daily either. That is the judgment Kayas exists to keep sharp: not one function’s craft, but the understanding that bridges them, whichever side of the bridge you start from.

The problem I kept hitting

I had learned the thing. I just could not reach it when it mattered.

I read the books. I took the courses. I had good mentors and took careful notes. And still, in the moment I needed a concept, it was gone. Not because I never learned it, but because I learned it once, months before, and nothing had brought it back since.

Management judgment fails quietly this way. The meetings where you need it are weeks apart, so forgetting always wins the race. Rereading my notes felt productive and mostly was not. It built a comfortable familiarity that I kept mistaking for real knowledge, right up until the moment I had to use it and could not.

What actually fixed it

Two old ideas, put to work.

The Feynman technique, up close

Learn it well enough to teach it.

Richard Feynman was a physicist who won a Nobel Prize and was better than almost anyone at making hard ideas feel obvious. His method for learning was simple, and a little humbling. It runs in four moves.

1. 01Take one idea and study it. Read it, watch it, whatever gets it into your head the first time.
2. 02Explain it in plain words. Out loud or on paper, as if you were teaching someone who has never heard of it. No jargon to hide behind.
3. 03Find where you stumble. The moment you reach for a buzzword or go vague is the exact spot you do not really understand yet. Go back to the source and close that gap.
4. 04Simplify until a beginner would get it. Trade the jargon for a plain example or a small analogy. If you can teach it simply, you own it.

The catch is that teaching is a test you cannot fake. You either hold the idea in a form you can use, or the gaps show up the second you try to explain it. Kayas builds that test into every lesson: you do not just read a concept, you have to apply it to a real situation, which is the same move as explaining it. That is the half of learning most tools quietly skip.

The evidence it rests on

None of this is a hunch.

Kayas is opinionated, but it is not improvised. The ideas it runs on are among the most replicated findings in the science of memory, some of them more than a century old.

• The forgetting curve. Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how fast we forget and found a curve that has held up ever since: memory drops fast at first, then levels off, and most of a new idea is gone within days unless something brings it back. [Ebbinghaus, 1885]
• The spacing effect. Reviews spread over time beat the same reviews crammed together, by a wide margin. It is one of the most durable results in psychology, confirmed across hundreds of experiments. [Cepeda et al., 2006]
• The testing effect. Pulling an answer out of your own head strengthens a memory far more than reading it again. Being tested, not rereading, is what makes learning stick. [Roediger & Karpicke, 2006]
• The generation effect. You remember what you produce better than what you consume. Explaining an idea in your own words, the heart of the Feynman technique, is exactly that. [Slamecka & Graf, 1978]

Kayas does not ask you to take any of this on faith. It puts these findings to work on one specific job, keeping professional judgment sharp, and gets more accurate as it learns from real recall. For the full mechanics, see how Engram works.

What Kayas does with them

Learn it by using it, then meet it again right before you forget.

Every lesson in Kayas is short and ends in application: a real scenario where you have to use the idea, not just nod along to it. That is the Feynman half. Then Engram, the scheduler inside Kayas, watches how well you actually knew it and brings it back at the edge of your own forgetting. That is the spacing half.

It is built for five minutes a day, in the gaps between meetings, because that is where the forgetting happens and that is the only time a busy leader actually has. Study a concept once, then keep it for good.

I built Kayas for the version of me who had the right lesson written down somewhere and could not find it in time. If that sounds familiar, it will feel like it was made for you, because it was.

Sadi Kaya

Founder of Kayas