You've created a truly great atmosphere in which we were really supportive to our colleagues :)

By always being approachable and relaxed and open to give me feedback, you made me feel like our team is a safe place where I can go to get feedback to improve myself and feel happy and comfortable.

I am super-impressed by how you managed to keep your team running and also do significant work outside of the track - by which I refer to eg you building [***], which now we can all enjoy and use to teach Perl. This was really something major - quite aside of the technical sweetness, it enables the company to do much more in teaching.

You are engaging for discussions needed and flex well on your communication style to achieve clarity on what needs to be done in the next steps. You are also very humble! This is something I get with every discussion we are having. As a result of this, I think you create an environment that everyone feels welcomed to help (if they can) and brings more impact.

You are an experienced TL and you know what and how it needs to be done, for sure. Step by step, you enabled the architectural evolution to turn it into better shape to easily scale up. Open for feedbacks and act on them. Nice and calm communication style. Good planner to utilise team to effectively contribute to product.

You created a team with a lot of trust and freedom to be able to express and growth. There was a conflict between team members and you found a great way to keep them collaborating and have a clear expectation of what they need to do. The team was big and we were losing a lot of time in some meetings and unclarity and you brought some change that improved.

Merging of the Shopping and Food team was no easy task but Abdullah was very helpful in its integration. It was no easy task to do that. He led the effort to have better sprint planning in a much bigger team was doubled overnight. He has a very pragmatic and logical approach which is good as a TL. He also has very patient with his team which was very helpful to keep every calm in the turbulent integration phase.

Abdullah, you set the team in motion from the moment you joined! Great work setting us up for success, keeping us on track, slicing down the bigger goal into smaller steps for our devs, and overall managing to take control (when we needed it!) while still maintaining your calm and positive attitude. That shows great courage and leadership and confidence, especially when stepping into a new team (with big personalities!). Appreciate you carrying the team together!

You take a pragmatic approach to building things where they are needed and not making them bigger than they need to be but willing to collaborate and improve on them based on feedback.
Your work building the [***] has been really useful for us to begin using in Food to start iterating and discovering how to get analytics right across the verticals.
The feedback tool you built has also been very useful in my team to request and give feedback to each other in a less formal format, which I believe has resulted in higher quality feedback compared to [***].

You do what you can to provide us a comfortable environment for us to work on; You have a very good communication style which makes it for me to easy to talk to you; You are direct on what you and I should expect from each other; You contribute heavily to the team technically; From what I see and hear from the team is that you were able to have a big impact on the team since joining; You helped the team reach multiple agreements on the tech stack which should limit the buzz factor, and make the team more focused on delivering than following tech buzz; You are a leader by nature, people respect you and trust you in the team.

He is a true example of software professionalism and reflecting Booking.com values; Here in Booking, we have so many devs with huge technical experiences, but few of them, like Abdullah, are willing to share their thoughts and experiences with teams for the sake of products; He has very strong general and Booking.com specific technical background which helped him to build systems like [***] without too much hassle; His contributions and involvement in retrospective meetings and facebook posts is sign of how he is open to discussions and ready to challenge ideas to make things better for everyone.

Abdullah came to our team during pretty hard time for our team from both product and people perspective. He managed to understand the situation pretty fast, figure out main pain points and set up all the processes in time in a way that allowed the team to leave storming phase and move to productive development. I value this contribution a lot and see this as one of the major factors that allowed us to release [***] at all. Few things to outline: Clear understanding and great execution of team lead's responsibilities; Ability to take ownership on what needs to be done; Ability to explain his colleagues what to do to improve the processes and their performance.

Abdullah's strong technical strength some time makes me feel like we have a safety filter, as his arguments are on point and he shares in depth feedback, if Abdullah is okay of what has been proposed I feel it has passed an important filter. This is something that Abdullah has earned after many discussions. Abdullah has a good communication style that enables him to facilitate meetings with ease. He ensured that all of us have work to do by assigning us domains. He acknowledges and rewards good work which motivates team members. Abdullah has created the working agreement which really helps understand what we expect from each other and we expect from our systems

Abdullah has made a hugely positive impact on our team since joining. His style of leadership is mature and empathetic while being an assertive driver when the teams needs structure and boundaries. He's made a significant improvement to the way the team operates and I believe his exercise in creating the breakdown of tech stories was the reason for us reaching dev complete on the MVP product for Shopping. Abdullah has great communication, is a talented developer (unbelievably fast!), and shows initiative in building tools for the team and colleagues that have impact with his own team as well as the wider community. It's a pleasure to work with him, being an organised, calm and always level-headed person.

Abdullah stepped up to lead [***]. This was above and beyond his scope in Shopping vertical. Abdullah documented, presented this at the [***] meeting and we showed it at one of the all hands - great work!
Transition from Shopping to Food team was handled well with little distractions from Abdullah himself - Abdullah understood the business reasons and eagerly picked up Food area, started working with the teams, scoping out and understanding the area. I see the team being divided into areas now with clear working agreements and Abdullah scaling to lead both teams. I see Abdullah as an independent leader on the team who can pick up a complex engineering topic or a team leadership role and running with it on his own with impressive results.

In my opinion it was quite challenging to manage such a huge team of 16 people. To make sure we're able to work together as cohesive unit affectively. Abdullah compiled a Working Agreement document which helped us to be aligned in terms of how we work, how do we interact and common goals as a team. Abdullah organizes sprint planning sessions and makes sure we execute tasks in time and helps to sort out impediments we have a long the way. Gives valuable suggestions on our 1-1, attentive and supportive. Apart from what I mentioned above which takes the majority of his time, Abdullah found a time to develop and own [***] service, which has been used by several teams including our team. Thank you for your kindness, patience and support. Good to have you as a TL.

Abdullah has introduced many new structures and processes in the team allowing for a cadence to be built in terms of velocity, already noticeable in the team’s development process and familiarity with one another. With the reallocation Abdullah has been dedicated to making things work and to unify the Food team. Introducing various new ways of working, listening to the needs of the team and liaising with product to align these needs. Helpful in this have been our tech and product meetups and introducing a unified sprint planning. Abdullah has played a key role in bringing together the two teams (Food and Shopping); various team activities helped break the ice, allowing team members between teams to get to know each other, unlocking healthy team dynamics.

Rallying the team through difficult issues ranging from individual performance issues, conflicts to offsite & working agreements ; helping them deal with phasing of shopping project & subsequent merger with the Food team. Establishing regular sprints practice with weekly tech updates in Shopping. Abdullah cares about the team; he has a good pulse of the team at any given point of time. He balances individual development goals of his team well with business goals and upcoming committments our high level planning discussions. Abdullah is a business pragmatic team lead ; He balances the business goals & robust tech solutions well. Setting the right goals & ambition : I find Abdullah as a trusted counterpart for helping the team set ambitious targets which are achievable, not too aggressive but also demands the right commitment from the team.

Abdullah joined the team early in the year and his impact was phenomenal. The team did not have a tech leader and was struggling to convert their plans into actions. [***] was scoped out with the designs for months but the devs were not able to make progress on it. Abdullah was able to convert the product idea into actionable tasks and drive the team through an execution rigour. With him we made a significant progress compared to last year where we were not able to ship anything. He has established himself as the tech counterpart for me and I am really optimistic about working with him and delivering great quality products. Abdullah is also a very mature and calm person and is able to deal with any situation with a very logical approach. When he joined, there was tension in the team and he was able to come in, diffuse and get the people to work towards the goal. His top attributes are maturity, the ability to handle complex situations, and the ability to understand dev process and guide the team to execute on it.

I have really enjoyed working with Abdullah. He is one of the most calm, focussed and competent collegues. While he has continued to shine on all the characteristics highlighted in previous feedback (Work ethic, ability to handle complex situations etc), I wanted to give out certain examples from the last few months - Team empathy: Abdullah really puts the health of the team above all else. He tries to make sure that the team has the right environment and support to do their best work. He has been trying tirelessly to integrate the food and shopping team. Also has been pushing the product team to ensure we have clear goals and strategy and the team believes in them. He wrote a document proposing a new way of working for the team which I really appreciate. He has also been pushing for the team to do regular standups, sprint planning etc which is bringing the team together. We are also doing a Offsite soon which should help the team come together. Also, it was largely due to his efforts that we were able to resovle the issues within the shopping team and started to run near perfect sprints towards the end of our stint in Shopping. The timelines and quality of work also improved considerably. - Active interest in the product: He has been a great counterpart to brainstorm and discuss new ideas. Due to personal reasons, Abdullah has very limited time he can contribute at work and I appreciate him going the extra mile on this. - Calm and composed: I think this is probably the most exemplary quality of Abdullah. He has been going through a lot at home and is still able to support the team in the most objective manner. The integration of Shopping and Food hasn't been smooth and the expectation from Abdullah has increased many folds. He not only has to integrate himself into the strategy and new team, he also has the added responsibility of managing double the team now. I believe it can be very hard and Abdullah has been doing a great job at it.

Cares about personal development of people in the team and looks for ways to find opportunities for people to stretch, like delegating some of the projects/areas to folks. Abdullah is consistently on top of performance of his team, identifies even the small improvement points and gives feedback timely. Sets clear expectations with team members and works on their development plans. Managed underperformance effectively. Generally most of the people in his teams grew in the last year be in in their craft or communication. Servant Leadership - Abdullah is approachable and makes time for everyone in the team. He holds regular weekly 1:1s, listens to people and provides regular feedback. He got some feedback to get more involved in the business and product, and acted on it. Abdullah regularly contributes to our discussion with product on prioritization and ideas.

Keeps stakeholders up to date, through 1:1s and structured communication like biweekly updates. Clear communication, calm and composed. Good facilitation skills. Actively seeks feedback and acts on it. Shares knowledge with a wider audience. Collaborates effectively with people outside of team. Approachable and easy to communicate with. Good ability to influence, both in steering tech discussions, but also in working with the product. Good in prioritizing and balancing TL vs core workload.

After shopping joined the team was a bit bloated and also a bit in limbo due to waiting on 2020 planning closure. This immediately proved to be ineffective, which team members escalated quickly. Abdullah jumped on the case, introduced structure - sprint, jira, working agreements, areas of ownership, pushed product to clarify the direction ... This led to immediate improvement both in team performance and people’s engagement, and the team improved in their delivery. Abdullah made use of processes effectively in shopping and food, listening to the team needs and iteratively building up the process. Abdullah drove the organisation of the offsite in collaboration with product. In my opinion the offsite was a big success and had quite a positive impact on team engagement, we went through product topics, tech topics, and a retrospective, and people were quite engaged, the topics are right.

Last half a year was a nightmare for any kind of manager, but Abdullah managed to get through it very well.

I should definitely highlight the process of team migration to the WFH environment. I always felt informed about the current situation, because Adbullah organized a number of meetings to address the situation, kept everybody informed via slack & email.
Before, during and after the transition to WFH, I saw that Abdullah is doing his best to ensure the process was done right for everybody, everyone has their stuff moved, schedule and wfh process settled down properly, work-life balance maintained correctly to ensure colleagues’ sanity and mood.

I see that Abdullah is keeping track of my working environment/process/communication by keeping 1-on-1 going on a weekly basis, and is flexible enough to skip them when they’re simply not needed.

From a development perspective, I saw efforts from his side to ensure the bus factor is not growing in the app, especially for new features. 3 people already took part into implementing a certain feature - even though it slowed down the development, it benefited the bus factor enormously.

I see that my team lead is taking care about management of the team working process.

Right from the beginning Abdullah helped me and the whole team out with onboarding by facilitating tech sessions. At the end he assigned peers for knowledge sharing. I think it was a successful idea that worked out very well. Divide and Conquer!
Being a TL of pretty big team doesn't make you hands-off from development. You still push the code and contribute to the codebase.
Abdullah sends out team sprint updates timely, usually responds in a reasonable period of time.
He kicked off the WFH document and showed high sense of ownership by proactively writing up the first draft and later on improving it further on with the team.
Pizza night - amazing idea that brought a lot of informal and positive vibes into our teams. And even though I missed the event, I've heard many good words about it long afterwards.
I appreciate that you do a good job on managing the right expectations by notifying potential delays or some other events which might have certain impact in different work streams.

I think all of above (and not only) makes him a very valuable asset to team but also to our company. And I am glad to have a brother-like teammate with whom I really enjoy working with. Thank you, Abdullah!

You anticipated the work from home, and created a policy and a working contract which enabled to stay productive during those difficult time
You have a great communication style which makes you very approachable
You are is very proactive in the 1-1 you always share feedback with me and follow up on my objectives
A very important part of being a manger is to support the mental health of the team, I feel you always got my back covered in that sense , and made sure that I don't push my self to the danger zone
You are always available for technical discussions were your opinion matters
You support the team members to grow and give me them the space, how you gave *** space in managing retros for example, and giving priority to the team members to design and architect technical problems

You have a very patient and calm nature, which somehow has a relaxing effect in the meetings, especially if there is some tension between team members, you are able to effortlessly pacify them. You are excellent in your TL functions like planning facilitation, you’re always on top of what’s happening and tracking progress. You also easily spot dependencies and distribute work to the right team members, which shows that you are familiar with their strengths and preferences. On the communication/fun side, you’ve arranged the pizza evening for the whole track where we bonded in isolation. It was really important, as it happened in a moment when the lockdown was the strictest in Europe, where most of the team members were located. Meeting up for virtual team drinks really helped cheer up the atmosphere. Thanks for organising it!

First of all, thank you for all your efforts for the onboarding of the new team. I think you did great job at your support for structuring a bigger team starting with the Food offsite event. You arranged onboarding buddies for the new members to get the support they need. The technical meetings with the developers of the team were very useful and boosted up the onboarding process and helped us form a functional team in shorter time.

You are very consistent in publishing the updates for the core team so that everyone is informed about the developments in the product. Especially after the WFH situation, these communications are at great importance. You follow up the important tasks the team does (such as failover or getting traffic to Food) and provide support.

It has been amazing to work with Abdullah as a team lead. He empowers every individual on the team to work to the best of his capabilities and places great trust in everyone's work. He has a friendly and optimistic approach to work and makes sure that everyone has all the necessary resources to easily perform their tasks and to improve the product. I feel that I can reach out to Abdullah whenever I have any question and that he will be able to help me find the answers and solutions I need. He makes sure that the team's morale is up and that we keep a close relationship with one another even during these challenging times. I'm looking forward to continue working with Abdullah and to continuously improve our product.

In this unprecedented times, he minimised the negative impacts of COVID-19 and WFH policy on his works. Transitioned into new era as smooth as possible while maintaining the ability to contribute the objectives which are inherited from pre-crisis times, as if nothing happened. The key accomplishments in his jobs that I witnessed, planning and sorting out truly random jobs that are thrown to technical team. at the beginning of the period, the way his participation in splitting the Food Team into justifiable sub-teams was outstanding and yielded increase in productivity.Periodically held one-to-one meetings with team members are not effected by WFH and was as efficient as before.

As a team lead you did a great job, you was always collecting and giving feed back that helped keeping the team atmosphere healthy.
During the 1-1 you were providing information and feedback for helping to achieve my goals
As a developer you were always willing to help, several time you unblocked some FE tasks by extracting data from database and also tweaking some api to make the implementation smoother.
You was always providing information about the team/product/company to keep us updates which is much appreciated during the WFH period.

I like how you gave us a warm welcome when I joined the Food team, by assigning all new joiners a buddy. This really helped set me up for success. Additionally, you organized several deepdive sessions, where people in the core team on both frontend and backend explained parts of the infrastructure and ways code is organized.
Your initiative for pizza night came as a very pleasant surprise to me. It was a great way to bond the people again, after working from home for a few weeks with fairly little personal interaction.

Always there for tough questions, I can't get my head around, especially exotic places in our monolith. Amazing ownership and proactivity. Wanna praise you for coming up for a way to increase psychological safety in the team by organizing one of the first online hangouts with pizza and drinks in our area and improve collaboration and reduce negative feelings on missing out on the social side (survey results).

Abdullah’s team is a hand full. Not only are we large in headcount compared to other product teams in Booking.com - we’re large in terms of product breadth and depth given that we own an entire product front to back. Abdullah does a great job in keeping the team aligned, keeping pulse on team sentiment, escalating this when needed and initiating e.g. the virtual dinner we’ve done together as a track.