Monthly Digest - Here Is Everything You Missed In October
Wrote 3 essays, read a lot of amazing pieces on Substack, and hit my first 100 sign ups milestone. October has been a heavy month. 🥳🙏🏽🙌🏽 ⚡️
Happy Sunday, Tribe -
Starting this month, I will send out a monthly recap of the previous month on the 1st of every new month. With everything going on, life can get super busy super fast. I am a new dad so I can understand that better than anyone.
I hit a milestone this week - 100 Signups for the Building Romes Newsletter. The tribe grows drop by drop. I saw my largest increase of sign ups in October alone. I am just humbled by the consistent Open Rate that I am seeing with each newsletter. You all are clearly enjoying the writing. Now, is the time to push to grow.
I began writing at the beginning of July 2020. My goal for this newsletter is to write everything about being a leader in a technology organization drawing upon my own experience working at Apple, Google, Blackberry and to write for my younger self. Things I wish I knew when I started my career.
The goal was to get to 100 signups by the time I wrote my 12th essay but looks like we did it at the 8th issue. 🥳❤️🙌🏽⚡️🙏🏽✌🏾👀🙇🏽♂️
As the Building Romes experiment continues to grow, I want to turn this into more than just an email. My aim is to build a Tribe of leaders, experts, thinkers, doers, philosophers, readers, YOU, who are building products, trailblazing a new path, redefining the technology industry, or just want to know how Apple and Google build experiences.
Stay tuned - I have a lot of new ideas and things I want to do - and thank you for supporting my writing by reading and sharing it.
The journey has just begun.
Aadil ❤️
In the month of October, I wrote 3 essays -
(Oct 27) Lessons on Effective Release Planning From Apple and Google - As planning season is either kicking off, well underway, almost done, or complete, I shared some of the lessons I learned developing software release plans at companies like Apple and Google.
(Oct 12) Team of Teams - Developing a Shared Organizational Consciousness Requires BFM (Big Fucking Meetings) - Modern organizations are a composition of smaller teams structured in matrix like setup instead of rigid command control structures. How do we keep a common purpose across these team of teams without losing valuable collective knowledge and continue to develop trust?
(Oct 3) Observations on Consequences of Short-term Thinking in Technology Organizations - I deep dive into why technology organizations are so geared towards short-term gains even to the degree of sacrificing far more beneficial gain potentials from long-term commitments. There are internal and external factors that drive this behaviour and I talk about things we as leaders can do to fight this.
Here are my favorites from the Substack Universe in October
On A Media Operator - Podcast: Packy McCormick on Building Not Boring - Packy dives into his journey on building a massively popular and lucrative media operation from a substack newsletter by ignoring normal conventions.
Awesome People list - Ep 48 Engineering, team leadership, operational excellence - As I continue my own personal journey into leadership and people management, this timely advice from Saminda Wijegunawardena is worth the read.
Not Boring by Packy McCormick - Software is Eating the Markets - Packy does an amazing indepth deep dive into how software is transforming the financial markets and our investment behaviours.
The Beautiful Mess - The Product Outcomes Formula - John Cutler is one of my favourite Product Management writers on substack. This mathematical approach to developing product strategies is well worth the read.
Fintech Today - Can Fintech Change Campaign Finance?—DriveWealth Raises $54m - Cokie’s fantastic piece on whether fintech can play a positive or negative role in transforming our Campaign finance laws is a rather timely piece given we are 3 days away from the United State Presidential elections.
Napkin Math (Everything) - What You Need To Know About The Ant Financial IPO - With the highly anticipated massively big IPO from Ant Financial - Jack Ma’s fintech juggernaut, the smart folks over at Everything had a great breakdown into everything you wanted to know about the IPO.
Exponential View by Azeem Azhar - 🔮 How Apple innovates; Demis Hassabis; low code; twitch, blue-collar remotes, masks++ #293 - There is a great HBR case study in the newsletter from Exponential that deep dives into how Apple has updated it’s leadership structure to continue to innovate. It’s a long read but O.M.G. is it a great read. I saw the transformation with my own eyes when I was at Apple from 2012 to 2017 and it was cool to see names of Engineering Leaders I have had the privilege of working directly with at Apple.
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That’s it for this week. See You Next Time! 👋🏽
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