DossierPersonal Brief
SubjectNaveed Kakal
Edition2026 · v1.0
Folios01 / 09
Issued
StatusPublic
FOLIO 01 — COVER
§ COVER — A 20-year file, in nine folios.

I write software for the people who wash the world. Twenty years in commercial laundry — plant-ops, automation, telemetry, mobile.

Currently · Kannegiesser ETECH Industrial laundry software · since 2006
§ 02 — Executive summary
02 / 09

A short brief on a long career.

Started at ETECH in Minneapolis in 2006 — one Ruby on Rails app, a wall of serial-line PLCs, and a thousand Excel files holding the whole operation together.

Took the tools we built there to plants around the world after Kannegiesser acquired the team in 2017. Most of the last decade as Director of Software Development.

The teams I've led ship plant-ops software, machine-control automation, and remote-management surfaces to industrial laundries around the globe — and we re-shaped how we ship along the way. Hierarchical dev team → flat AI-paired engineers → now: a handful of senior operators driving AI armies for code and docs.

These days the job is less about writing every line and more about judgment — setting direction, reviewing what a fleet of agents produces, and making sure twenty years of laundry-floor pattern matching ends up in the software.

I make laundry plants legible to the people who run them.
§ 03 — Practice eras
03 / 09

Two decades. Three org models. One direction of travel.

I've been in the room for every shift — and on the keyboard.

Era 012006 — 2022
01

Hierarchical dev team

Director over leads, leads over engineers. Sprints, code review, releases.

Shipped eVue, Autopilot, the Automation layer, and Remote Orchestration this way. Worked — and we hit the limits.

Era 022023 — 2024
02

Flat, AI-paired engineers

One-person owners on whole product surfaces, each paired with the first wave of useful coding LLMs.

Re-org early. Fewer hand-offs, faster cycle time, every engineer suddenly able to write the boring docs that always got skipped.

Era 032025 — now
03● NOW

AI armies, senior drivers

A handful of operators directing fleets of agents for code, tests, migrations, docs, and customer-facing copy.

The job is now context, judgment, and review. The 20 years of laundry-floor pattern matching is the moat.

§ 04 — Capabilities
04 / 09

Surfaces I can take responsibility for.

§ 05 — Selected engagements
05 / 09

The work — credited to the teams behind it.

§ 06 — By the figures
06 / 09

Twenty years, counted.

§ 07 — Provenance
07 / 09

Software the teams have shipped runs in plants operated by —

+ Several more not listed here. Available on request.
§ 08 — On record
08 / 09

Notes, talks, and short essays.

P.S.

The brief above is genuinely how nerdy I am about commercial laundry.
We can absolutely talk about literally anything else over coffee.

↳ Folio · postscript
§ 09 — Colophon · Address
09 / 09

Got a plant, a product, or a problem? Open a line.

Email
naveed.kakal@gmail.com
Compose →
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/naveed-kakal
Open ↗
Resume
Naveed Kakal · CV · 2026.pdf
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