Kessel Run

In April 2017, a group of Air Force leaders from different organizations met in San Francisco with a shared goal: Find a manner to fundamentally transform the way the U.S. Air Force sources and delivers software at scale and provides warfighters with the capabilities they need to do their jobs and win! They knew navigating this journey would be daunting, and due to the idea of smuggling new concepts, processes and solutions into a tired, antiquated bureaucracy, they named the effort Kessel Run, for Star Wars hero Han Solo’s famed smuggling route. Technology alone is not enough. In order to deliver the capability necessary to support our warfighters, an organizational culture that stimulates high-performing teams is paramount. For this reason Kessel Run embraces and demonstrates four key team values: Ideas over rank, Intense customer focus, Bias for action and Continuous evolution. From our headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, we collaboratively work in balanced teams of software developers, designers, and product managers enabled by platform operators and support staff, to build products airmen need and love. Kessel Run continues to revolutionize the way the Air Force and the Department of Defense builds and delivers software capabilities using industry-proven software development practices and pairing them with talented military and civilian contributors. We continue to disrupt decades of government bureaucracy to achieve our highest mission -- providing cutting edge capabilities daily to our nation's warfighters.