/AbdulFattah Popoola

Finding The Goldilocks Zone: Just The Right Amount Of Process tl;dr: “All the struggling organizations I have worked in shared one common characteristic. They had process deficiencies: some did too little, while some did too much. The best-performing orgs? They did just right. This post offers suggestions and tips for leaders seeking to introduce change.”

featured in #547


The Complicated Parts Of Leadership: Betting On People tl;dr: “This experience left me wondering how many teams could be transformed with the proper investment in training and development. And also how many teams are struggling because they are too busy to invest in training.” The author provides the following tips when betting on people: (1) Have skin in the game. You must push past your discomfort and genuinely believe in the team’s abilities. (2) Stay curious and maintain curiosity, even when confronted with obstacles. (3) Verify and have accountability checkpoints.

featured in #414


Evaluating Managers: 5 Heuristics To Measure Managerial Impact tl;dr: Measuring a manager’s impact is hard since outcomes take time. This post provides early evaluation metrics as well as tips for course correction. Each of the following heuristics are explained in detail: execution, people management, team development, strategic vision & organizational influence.

featured in #381


Why Most Monitoring Strategies Fail tl;dr: "CAR stands for Customers, Applications, and Resources; it offers a solution to the monitoring disconnect by establishing the interactions between the three entities: the user, the application, and the underlying resources." AbdulFattah discusses how to use CAR, as well as outcomes, such as the identification of blind spots - detecting outages that would have gone unnoticed before. Exposure of long-hidden and long-standing flaws in the system, which in turn enables proper architectural fixes.

featured in #370


Using Systems Thinking To Craft High-Leverage Strategies tl;dr: "This post proposes a systems-based model for diagnosing, detecting, and fixing the fundamental issues that plague engineering teams. It is a distillation of lessons acquired from identifying and implementing high-leverage strategic remedies across multiple products."

featured in #327


9 Multipliers For Boosting Your Team’s Productivity tl;dr: The first 3 are: (1) Observability: covers the spectrum of logging, metrics, distributed tracing, telemetry, alerting, etc. (2) Estimate how long it takes your team to go through the CBTD (code-build-test-debug) loop and ask yourself what that numbers tell you. (3) Flaky tests erode trust and breed learned helplessness.

featured in #282


No Surprises: A Framework For Software Quality tl;dr: Abdul outlines a "Maslow Hierarchy for software quality" to help you prioritize and calculate tradeoffs. The hierarchy comprises of security, usability, reliability, performance and integrity, and is explained in detail.

featured in #257