Nabil Arnaoot monogram Nabil Arnaoot

Some Patterns

The same pattern, project after project: ask until the real problem surfaces, pick the right tool, and know when to push and when to leave room.

Some of My Favorite Questions

asked early, often

"It's six months from now. You are really happy. What has changed?"

"What's actually in your way — the manual task you dread, the approval stuck somewhere, the data you don't have?"

"What does the team already know that leadership needs to hear?"

"What are you reading?"

Two Kinds of Problems.

in practice
Duct Tape
When something doesn't hold together — I build the structure
A roll of duct tape
Siloed teams Unclear ownership No shared process
Drano
When something isn't moving — I clear the path
A bottle of drain cleaner
Stuck workflows Manual bottlenecks Waiting on sign-off

Everything Starts on a Whiteboard

thinking out loud

I can't work without a whiteboard. When I got to SFMTA I talked my director into putting one in my cubicle, and in meetings I'm usually the person who's drifted over to it and started sketching — lists, flowcharts, deliberately ugly diagrams. Getting the shape of a problem where everyone can see it and poke at it is most of the battle.

My rule of thumb is the line usually attributed to Einstein: make it as simple as possible, but no simpler. A diagram earns its spot on the board by being the simplest version that's still honest. At Apple, one board carried a sketch of the high-availability backup system for our databases for years.

Microchipping Sheep

the metaphor I use
A whiteboard drawn in orange marker: a horizontal line running from 'yeehaw!' on the left — a cowboy on horseback firing a pistol, labeled 'cowboys riding around shootin guns' — to 'big brother' on the right, a surveillance camera above a stack of books each labeled POLICY, captioned 'stacks of policies for everything you do.' An arrow points to a mark near the left end labeled 'microchip the sheep.'

Every org I walk into sits somewhere on this line, usually way over at the YEEHAW end — cowboys on horseback with their guns out, which is roughly where ops teams like to live. A good part of my job is nudging the marker one step toward the middle, while reassuring everyone I have zero interest in the other end. I'm not building a surveillance state. I just want to microchip the sheep.