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Category: Leadership

Articles on leading teams

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.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Career, Leadership, management, Musings Leave a comment January 9, 2023January 23, 2023 8 Minutes

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.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Best Practices, Leadership Leave a comment November 16, 2022January 16, 2023 5 Minutes

Book Review: Slack, Getting past burnout, busywork, and the myth of total efficiency


Leaders (managers, directors, VPs, etc.) should read this book if they want to create teams that execute predictably; the book also covers culture and other subtle elements that make teams work efficiently.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership, management Leave a comment September 13, 2022January 17, 2023 14 Minutes

Defense-in-depth: a strategy for leading understaffed teams


Leading an underfunded team is a challenge most managers will face over their careers. This blog post provides techniques and a framework for delivering impact under such conditions.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership, management Leave a comment August 25, 2022January 17, 2023 5 Minutes

3 quick tips for leading through uncertain times


This post offers three tips for leading teams going through a difficult period. It could be attrition, product changes, reorgs, uncertainty, etc. It is a playbook of 3 key things to keep in mind and includes a FAQ list of likely questions.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment June 13, 2022June 13, 2022 6 Minutes

Using Systems Thinking to craft high-leverage strategies


Most teams struggle with removing friction because they concentrate on surface-level reactionary fixes instead of addressing the fundamental causes of inefficiency.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Best Practices, Leadership Leave a comment May 16, 2022May 15, 2022 4 Minutes

Four mistakes I made as a new manager


This article relates hard-learned lessons as a newbie engineering manager. It targets new leads by clarifying leadership pitfalls to avoid.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment May 3, 2022January 16, 2023 6 Minutes

9 multipliers for boosting your team’s productivity


Multipliers make or mar engineering organizations - teams that invest in boosting the right capabilities at the right time will get more done with less. Teams that neglect these capabilities will eventually get bogged down – they’ll get less done with more.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Best Practices, Leadership Leave a comment January 3, 2022January 31, 2022 6 Minutes

Leading through difficult times: Put on your oxygen mask first 


The story of the most challenging stretch of my career so far and how I acquired years of leadership experience within months.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership 2 Comments November 8, 2021December 24, 2021 6 Minutes

The SOAR technique: How to get buy-in and overcome friction


You have a tried and tested approach for solving a knotty problem; however, getting organizational buy-in feels like pulling teeth. You’ve tried cajoling, begging, storming, bargaining and more to no avail. Nothing seems to work; you’re frustrated and thinking of quitting.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment September 6, 2021October 9, 2021 4 Minutes

From Chaos to Comfort: Transforming business output by eliminating pain


This post describes leading a team through a tough turbulent transition while handling hypergrowth and business pivots. It details the focus on high leverage activities to break the loop of never-ending toilsome tasks and reactive fires.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment August 16, 2021September 9, 2022 4 Minutes

How to successfully ramp up remote teams


One of my most frustrating leadership experiences involved setting things aright after a near miss with a remote team

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment July 19, 2021October 9, 2021 4 Minutes

How to Accelerate Team Bonding with Tuckman’s 5 Stages of Group Development


A team will go through some rough patch before it jells. Watch out for it, expect it and plan towards making it smooth. Brace for impact.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment July 5, 2021August 16, 2021 7 Minutes

How to rapidly onboard new teams: Part III


This post focuses on techniques and tactics for onboarding scenarios. These are the techniques I have seen over a decade of remote mentoring, being in teams and leading teams. Think of the suggestions as tailored heuristics for onboarding a new team based on the scenario.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment May 17, 2021October 17, 2021 8 Minutes

How to rapidly onboard new teams: Part II


This post focuses on steps to take during the first 3 months of forming a new team. It is the second post in the "How to onboard teams" series which covers lessons and techniques acquired from ramping up many teams. 

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership, Software Development Leave a comment March 23, 2021October 17, 2021 5 Minutes

Lessons Learned from rapidly ramping up 3 teams in a year: Part I


How do you get a brand new team to become productive within three months? This post describes the lessons and techniques from rapidly ramping up these teams. These tips should help new members become productive within 12 weeks.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Career, Leadership 2 Comments March 3, 2021October 17, 2021 6 Minutes

What values do great leaders encourage?


I have had several managers across several teams and projects. This has exposed me to various management styles and taught me what to emulate and what to avoid. There are no silver bullets when it comes to leadership however these are a few things I appreciate.

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment February 24, 2020October 9, 2021 3 Minutes

High Output Management: Chapter 2 Review


A summary of chapter 2 of high output management

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment August 26, 2019August 12, 2021 2 Minutes

Leading teams: Stop giving answers


Stop giving people answers all the time!

AbdulFattaah Popoola Leadership Leave a comment July 22, 2019October 24, 2021 1 Minute

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