I’ve seen these patterns repeat across every engineering organization I’ve worked with—from fast-moving startups to massive, multi-cloud systems. The fundamentals don’t change, no matter the scale. Stability is invisible when it works and unforgettable when it fails. Great engineering teams know this, which is why they treat fundamentals as their operating system—not a side project. Availability, security, quality, and performance aren’t checkboxes. They’re the disciplines that keep teams fast, customers confident, and innovation moving.
Author: AbdulFattaah Popoola
Sharing leadership lessons acquired while building 5 different SaaS products. Avid reader + writer. Tenacious optimist.
When You Inherit a Struggling Team
You inherit a team mid-flight. You didn’t hire them. You didn’t set the culture. But now it’s yours—and the results are on you. Some leaders react with frustration. Others get to work. In this piece, I break down a practical playbook for turning around a low-performing team: how to listen, diagnose what’s broken (people, product, or process), land early wins, and sustain momentum. It’s not glamorous work—but it’s some of the most meaningful leadership you’ll ever do.
5 Useful Aphorisms to Elevate Your Leadership Game
Whether you’re managing a group or facing challenges solo, these aphorisms offer a way to streamline your thinking and create a culture that thrives on problem-solving.
Book Review: Thinking in Systems
The book discusses the fundamentals of systems theory, emphasizing interconnectedness, stock, and flow dynamics. It highlights systemic problems, such as addiction and resource management, and explores how common misconceptions can lead to ineffective approaches. It underscores the importance of understanding system behavior and structural change for driving impactful outcomes and sustainable solutions.
Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Just the right amount of process
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.
Book Review: The Mom Test
The Mom Test is a concise and impactful guide for startup founders, emphasizing the importance of asking the right questions to distinguish genuine customer needs. It highlights common mistakes and provides practical advice.
Book Review: Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects
This book places a heavy emphasis on risk and academic analysis. The key lesson is to avoid relying on lucky breaks in plans.
Paper Review: Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
TLDR ★★★★ Very easy to read. Direct link to the paper. Interesting takeaways Novel approach to conflict resolution: Unlike most data systems that push conflict resolution to the write phase, Dynamo allows writes and shifts conflict resolutions to reads. This unique strategy ensures that writes are never rejected. Quality: An impressively high bar by focusing … Continue reading Paper Review: Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
Leadership Strategies for Product Maturity Phases
This post delves into crucial challenges at each product maturity phase. Senior engineering managers and high-level executives will benefit significantly from examining their portfolios and applying applicable strategies.
BCE: A structured approach to prioritizing work and allocating resources
Do you struggle to balance your urgent tactical needs with important strategic goals? Do you wonder how to handle the boatload of important customer requests by prioritizing and allocating resources? The BCE framework is for you.
Incident Response doesn’t have to be painful: Common pitfalls and recommendations
This post challenges misconceptions about chaotic on-call and livesite practices, offering lessons from extensive experience. It introduces common red flags like call hell, hero worship, and the wild west, and provides solutions. These include customer-focused monitoring, monitoring pruning, 1-2-3 troubleshooting rule, follow-the-sun schedules, and repair item deadlines. As services mature, standardized incident response and efficient toil control practices become crucial.
The language Series: Ruby
The post discusses my experience with learning and using Ruby, highlighting its good, bad, and weird parts.
Turning Tension into Triumph: Techniques for Tough Conversations
This article distills some hard-learned lessons into reusable playbooks for tense situations and is for everyone trying to improve their conflict resolution skills.
The cow and the chicken: overcoming resistance to change
The Cow and Chicken are journeying through the countryside and see a diner with a sign that reads "Steak and Eggs". The chicken nudges the cow and cackles delightfully: "Look! Look, Cow!! We're famous!!!". Whereupon, the cow looks at the same sign and snorts derisively: you're involved! I am committed!!
Help! I’m stuck! I want to get to the next level!!
This article clarifies how promotions work and highlights potential pitfalls. It describes a career-growth framework based on technical skills, interpersonal relationships, and influence. As one becomes more senior, the balance between these skills shifts, demanding more focus on relationships and influence.
Keep calm and carry on: Taming the siren call of overwhelm and overwork
If you are constantly overwhelmed and too busy - something somewhere somehow is wrong. Read on to learn more about my journey from an overwhelmed, feisty, flustered newbie to an equanimous, calm, collected professional with arguably more impact.
A 3-step strategy for experienced professionals starting new jobs
My last manager commended my rapid ramp-up and steady progress throughout my onboarding phase. I chuckled silently - if only he knew my many mistakes in my past 6 attempts. This post shares some techniques for rapidly making a difference in a new domain.
The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
Introduction "How can I trust you? You keep telling me about a new direction every other month" My report after the 3rd organizational pivot within three months. Background I was dumbstruck – there was nothing I could say. As a line manager, I was responsible for delivering the message even though I didn't make some … Continue reading The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
Ace Your Job Interview: Tips for Landing Your Dream Job
This post presents tips for the interview process and valuable resources, especially during this challenging whirlwind of layoffs. Most of these are lessons from my 100+ hours of interviewing at ~20 companies.
The complicated parts of leadership: Trust and Verify
In this series of short stories, I share tricky situations I've encountered while leading teams. These experiences have taught me invaluable leadership lessons and greatly influenced my management style. I hope to help others become more effective leaders by sharing these anecdotes.
The complicated parts of leadership: Betting on people
In this series of short stories, I share tricky situations I've encountered while leading teams. These experiences have taught me invaluable leadership lessons and greatly influenced my management style. I hope to help others become more effective leaders by sharing these anecdotes.
10x your feedback game: Choose kindness over niceness
What if I told you there was a way to overcome that sinking feeling associated with delivering feedback? Yes! You can learn to deliver great feedback with deliberate practice. Read on to learn some useful techniques.
Evaluating Managers: 5 heuristics to measure managerial impact
Measuring a manager's impact is hard since outcomes take time. The manager takes full responsibility for the team - be it stagnation, execution woes, poor collaboration, churn, or a lack of focus. This post provides early evaluation metrics as well as tips for course correction.
Scaling past Port Exhaustion: when 100k+ ports were not enough
One of my favorite technical projects involved overcoming a network constraint. The virtual machines (VMs) hosting the core services kept exhausting available ports. Once all ports were used up, new connections would fail, tanking our availability and reliability. Read on to learn how we overcame this issue and opened up opportunities to reduce costs by a third.
Why most monitoring strategies fail
A team without proven observability and on-call strategies will invariably suffer from reactive disruptions; mitigating outages will be painful, like finding a needle in a haystack while blindfolded.
