DEV Community: Susanne Abdelrahman

Half-Baked, Fully Shipped: My Therapist Accidentally Fixed My AI Strategy

Susanne Abdelrahman — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:13:39 +0000

In therapy the other day (reminder: therapy is great and more of us should go 🙂) I had a realization about the three times in my career I left a job without another one lined up. Yes, three. Nope, didn't have a backup plan. I financially prepped for the last one, because I recognized it was coming - I could feel myself about to hit a wall. There was only so long I could do my job well enough, look for something new, and keep it together before something gave and for me it was always the job. Maybe there's a post about burnout somewhere in here. Anyway.

All three times I ended up in roles I absolutely would not have considered if I'd stayed and quiet quit instead. I've been turning over why, because it wasn't only skill or luck. I think it's because during those breaks I let myself follow whatever threads were remotely interesting to me and just... maximized the time I spent doing things that brought me joy.

By the time I was ready to search again I approached it in kind of the same way - open to things I'd have ruled out or just never thought to consider. I stopped filtering my destination through the job titles I thought I should be targeting. Instead I looked for roles that would let me do what I knew and loved, regardless of what they were called. During those breaks, I didn't see the possibilities clearly enough to limit myself to them and it turned out that was the whole point.

Which, again, not a strategy I'd recommend.

But having made that connection I'm using that learned experience to step into the unknown again in the hopes of bigger and better. Not a career break this time, though 🤪

At work I’m leading the charge on rebuilding our product delivery lifecycle from first principles with AI as a first-class citizen. We're in early stages and my instinct keeps being to start from what EPD folks have traditionally done and figure out how to map it onto the new thing. It's the wrong instinct and that connection I made in therapy is exactly why.

AI is transforming software development into a whole new world and slapping AI onto our -current- PDLC to augment our -current- responsibilities to work through our -current- processes and phases that produce our -current- outputs will not be what gets us there. I think what will is embracing the unknown about what AI will do to our current work with curiosity and keeping our goals centered on care - for the humans using the software, and for the humans building it.

I'm still sitting with this, so no clean wrap up from me. But I'm giving a talk at MoTaCon this year and I think this thread is where it's headed.

Half-Baked, Fully-Shipped: Saving The Bees, One Bumblebee At A Time

Susanne Abdelrahman — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:15:00 +0000

I wrote this standing in my backyard after rescuing a cold-stunned bumblebee. I almost didn't post it (my self editing highlight reel: it's too personal and weird, there isn't a clear point, it's not quality related at all, and I scream at the end of the video 😂) But I'm fighting the self editing and posting anyway 💪

—-

No matter what happens for the rest of the day, nothing can bring me down because I saved a life, y'all.

This morning I watched (from a distance, of course, because I sure as heck didn't want to be anywhere near it) a giant bumblebee float to the ground in my backyard and loudly buzz and twitch until it stopped moving. I was pretty sure it died but then remembered something I overheard on a video about bees that my kids were watching (YouTube isn't all bad I guess 🙃). And even though I'm really, really scared of bugs I put on my big girl pants, scooped that poor paralyzed bee into a cup, and placed it beside a heater we keep outside so we can hang out when it's cold.

And … the bee came back to life! I mean, it wasn't really dead, but it started moving again and then flew away. It flew directly at me first though, as if to thank me (I know I'm just assigning human traits to this little bee but roll with it). What a glorious feeling. A little too close for comfort for me, but also pretty cool.

Video proof below but heads up: it's 8+ minutes long with nsfw music (I've got eclectic tastes 🤷‍♀️). Mute if you want. Or embrace the chaos.

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On Dream Teams: The Practical Part

Susanne Abdelrahman — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:52:08 +0000

Before I get into this, I need to address something from my last post. I used the word "terrified" to describe my career experiences with hard conversations, and that was the wrong word. What I meant was: those situations were really personally challenging for me. Anxiety-inducing and uncomfortable in ways that touched on my own internal stuff.

But, terrified? No. I'm incredibly lucky and privileged in so many ways. There is a lot happening in the world right now that is genuinely terrifying, to people who are experiencing things I can't even comprehend. So I'm not going to use that word for career discomfort anymore. Those experiences were just scary for me, for personal reasons. Maybe that's TMI, but I'm trying to be real here.

In my last post, I talked about what makes a dream team for me: honesty, trust, the ability to disagree loudly while fully committing. But I kept it all pretty abstract, so here's a follow-up post on what I actually try to do to help create the conditions where that kind of team can grow.

I'm intentional about how I communicate. I try to assume good intent from the people I'm working with. When I catch myself reacting defensively to something, I try to step outside the situation and be a little more objective about it - what context might I be missing? What story am I telling myself and how do I know that it's true? I've learned that responding from a place of curiosity instead of reactivity can change the entire dynamic of a conversation.

I make it ok to make mistakes. When something goes wrong I keep the focus on what we can learn (it’s easier to do with other folks’ mistakes than my own 🙃). When people see that mistakes are learning opportunities, they're more willing to try hard things. That’s why I share (loudly) when I've screwed up and what I learned from it.

I make it ok not to know something. Not only do I share what I've learned after mistakes - I share what I'm learning, period. When I was more junior, this meant sharing what I learned with folks who might not have the same information. As I grew, it became more formal mentorship. Now it's also about enabling others to do this by building a culture where learning out loud is normal. And the business case: It makes the team faster because we don't waste time hiding problems or pretending we know things we don't.

I try to help us understand how our work affects each other. Not in the "let's demo what we're working on" way (though that's important too). I mean the "how does my work impact the people I'm working with?" way.

People tend to have a good sense of this within their immediate teams because work is usually clearly connected. But when you have an engineering team supporting, say, a sales team or support team, and you're making changes to processes or tools - if you're five degrees of separation away and you don't have context about how your work might impact them, you can't imagine what your changes might mean for other people. Without that context, you can't see how decisions ripple outward and something that feels small from one angle can create real friction from another.

I'm really intentional about connection. On remote teams especially I actively look for ways to let each other know what's going on in our lives and share more about who we are as people (reasonably, not forced, respecting everyone's boundaries).

There are so many ways to approach this - sharing "manual of me" or "working with me" docs (I wrote about this here). Starting team meetings with a quick icebreaker that's not about work. Doing things like Fun Thing Friday (a new coworker brought Fun Shirt Friday over from his last gig, and since I don't have fun shirts, I do Fun Earring Friday instead).

We all have real lives and interests outside of what we do at work. Keeping that visible helps us remember we're all human when things get tense. And things always get tense eventually.

I try to live by two personal principles I've gotten clearer about over the last few years, even though I've been operating by them for much longer without having good language for it.

Do what's best for the collective, even - maybe especially - when it's uncomfortable for me personally
Don't let fear of failure or embarrassment be the *only* reason I don't do something

These principles show up everywhere in my life and at work they push me to do things like naming uncomfortable dynamics out loud, giving feedback that would be easier to avoid, and pushing back on behavior that undermines the culture I want to be part of.

Those conversations are hard! They're even harder when the person on the other side is more senior than you. And I want to be clear: it’s not always safe or appropriate to have them - power dynamics and psychological safety matter. When I can, though, I push myself to have them, because avoiding hard conversations almost always makes things worse in the long run.

Look, I want to be real here: I fail at these things. I don't meet my own bar regularly (even recently 🫠). Sometimes not even close! But I want to work with dream teams enough that I'm willing to do the uncomfortable work that helps create the conditions where they can grow.

On Dream Teams

Susanne Abdelrahman — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:27:00 +0000

Hi y'all. It’s been a minute. (Is that something we only say in New York? If you say that and you’re not from New York, please let me know. I’m genuinely curious.)

Anyway.

I guess I’m a real blogger now because this is my first "whoops, I disappeared and now I’m back" post. A lot has happened - I made a trip out to SF, took an interesting online course, and started new job in a different (adjacent) function. I have posts I still want to write about all of it, but this first one back is about dream teams.

This topic has been bouncing around in my head for a while. But yesterday, after referring to a past team as a "dream team" in a comment, I was hit by a wave of nostalgic warm-and-fuzzy dream-team feelings. A small comment that made me stop and think about what "dream team" actually means to me.

A small comment that made me stop and think about what “dream team” means to me.

I've been luck to work at companies that genuinely supported their employees, alongside pretty incredible folks. That combination has led to some dreamy teams. But over my career, I've learned that smart people and supportive companies are great *and* are still not enough.

So what is it that actually gives me that magical dream-team feeling?

For me, it just comes down honesty and trust.

Dream teams trust each other enough to disagree without it getting personal or political. They have candid conversations and can disagree loudly while still fully committing. They call each other out when someone crosses a line. They can stand by their opinions against a majority while having enough humility to really hear their team and maybe change their minds.

I know those conversations are hard, and having them early on in my career genuinely terrified me. But they're necessary if you want to develop and maintain the kind of culture where people feel heard and seen and valued - regardless of whether they're "winning" that particular argument.

The dream teams I've been part of didn't always feel comfortable but they felt real. Caring about someone enough to be honest even when it was hard? How awesome is that?

I've always been on the lookout for teams like that because I wanted to work with people who were smart and kind and candid, and who I could have fun with while building cool shit together. And I found them (multiple times!) which is more luck than some folks get.

Now, though, I'm not only looking for dream teams - I'm looking to help grow them. I want to nurture the kind of culture in a place where those teams can naturally develop and last.

I've found one of those places (more on that soon, there's a lot to catch up on). For now, though, I’m holding a lot of gratitude for the teams that shaped me and feeling so excited about what comes next.

Minimum Viable Caring

Susanne Abdelrahman — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:53:44 +0000

It’s college football season here in the US and that means I get lots of quality time with my husband watching. So. Much. Football. During a game this past Saturday a promo came on about players visiting kids with cancer using these little robots that reminded me of Johnny Number 5 from Short Circuit (another favorite childhood movie I'll be forcing on my kids soon 🙃. We've gotten through The Princess Bride and The Sandlot, both with rave reviews 🎉).

Input remembered? Zero. Care carried? Also zero.

It was cool, because the players could beam in remotely, right? So that meant fewer germs, easier scheduling, and possibly more visits. My first reaction was the easy one: oh, how sweet. Isn't it great what technology can do? On the surface, it felt like a total win. At the same time a less comfortable thought crept in: is it really?

Before robots, those players would have had to show up and walk hospital halls. Maybe they'd hear a tough story from the staff or see a kid wearing their jersey who's lost half their body weight. Maybe they’d meet a kid who talks about playing football "when they get better" with the kind of hope that lifts you up and also breaks you. I bet they’d have dozens of unplanned moments that they would carry home, and that would ignite something that echoes into other parts of their lives. But with robots? Log in, smile, wave, log off. It's caring, yes. But only as much as the minimum requires.

This particular feel-good story stood out to me because I’ve been interviewing for Technical Project Manager roles, where improving team efficiency is a big part of the job. Without question, I would focus on that, but I also want to stay mindful of all the “inefficient” things that actually do important but invisible work.

How many times have you unexpectedly gained something that you didn’t know you needed, after taking an extra step that you didn't really have time for? These moments happen in the margins - in conversations that run over, reviews that dig deeper, meetings where the real issues finally surface. They're messy and unplanned, but they're often where the actual work gets done.

Are we thinking enough about what we're losing when we optimize away these moments? When we chase efficiency, we're always trading something off. When those trade-offs are invisible or taken for granted, we don't realize we're sweeping away meaning in the mess.

This would be one of the biggest things I'd wrestle with as a TPM. Some inefficiencies are just waste, but others are doing work we don't see until it's gone. Great TPMs recognize and protect the second kind while ruthlessly cutting the first. Because if there's one thing I learned while working in QA, minimum viable caring might get us to done but it certainly won't get us to great.

When Quality Work Doesn't Land (And Other Things I’ve Been Thinking About)

Susanne Abdelrahman — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 04:22:06 +0000

Between school being out, some family travel, and interviews (2 this week for really interesting roles - wish me luck! 🤞), these last few weeks have been something of a blur. Never mind all of the awful things going on across the world and how that adds a constant hum of existential dread to the background of everything.

Anyway. Things are settling down some for me now so here’s a little catch up for y’all ✨

First up: I’ve been published!

Well, kind of 😅 I wrote an article for Ministry of Testing. It explores something uncomfortable: what if the people saying “hiring software testers causes more harm than good” are right? (Just… not in the way they think.)

I got to work with the wonderful team at MoT on this, and the article has already sparked some thoughtful discussion over at the Club forum. Come chime in!

Also: catching up on things I bookmarked weeks ago and finally have the brainspace to dive into.

In the latest Testing Experience magazine:

Lisa Crispin’s article, Meaningful Metrics , was a great summary of how metrics should (and should not) be used to measure team performance and how DORA metrics fit in to that.
Tobias Geyer’s article, Software accessibility includes gender diversity , is a clear breakdown of where software often fails trans and non-binary users and offers really practical way for testers to support our fellow humans.
Stephan Dreher’s article, How I build my own GenAI test data generator , has given me some inspiration for my own vibe-coding experiments.

I’ve also been working my way through the Leading With Quality Conversations series over at Ministry of Testing (Pro membership required). Highlights so far:

Callum Akehurst-Ryan: Loved this one. The entire time I was having flashbacks to my senior IC days. That part where he just casually lists all of the things that testers need to be good at (23:45)? 💯 I also really liked how he called out that his reporting in to the CTO and having an engineering title (vs a more traditional testing title) make engineers more receptive to his coaching - very real.
Lisa Crispin: Working on teams that have unicorn magic is the goal (unicorn magic == psychological safety + culture of learning + strong practices)
Jenny Bramble: Jenny’s energy is infectious! I really felt her call for leadership-level community in QA. It’s one of the things I miss most about working with a large group of really brilliant quality engineers. Being the (often only) senior quality person at the table can be isolating and having like-minded folks to vent to, bounce ideas off of, or gut-check with is everything.

Other internet rabbit holes I’m glad I followed

This Bluesky post led me to this fascinating public research project (and also to a hypnotic but also depressing YouTube video of a school drop off car line)
This post from Ethan Mollick on “The Bitter Lesson vs. the Garbage Lesson” has been bouncing around my head for a couple of days now. QA roles have a unique view into "the nuanced roles humans play in complex systems" (like software 💁‍♀️). If The Bitter Lesson holds true, what does that mean for that nuance and the role of humans in these systems? 🤷‍♀️

Half-Baked, Fully Shipped: When Big Means Small (And Why Quality Definitions Matter)

Susanne Abdelrahman — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:54 +0000

The other night, my husband mumbled to pass him the “big pillow”. Half asleep, I reached for what I thought he meant - the long body pillow. “No, the big one”, he insisted. Confused, I handed him the only other pillow on the bed. A shorter but much fuller and thicker pillow. “This one?” I asked. “Ah, yes thank you,” he mumbled and quickly fell back asleep.

But I couldn’t fall back asleep. I kept thinking about we were both right and both wrong 🫠

(Of course, I was more right. But that’s not the point.)

The pillow he wanted wasn’t “big” in length. It was the smallest one on the bed. But it was the fattest, the most substantial. We used the same word to describe completely different dimensions.

This kind of miscommunication happens constantly in product development. When stakeholders say they want “quality,” what dimension are they actually talking about? Bug-free code? User experience polish? Ease of delivery? Reliability under load?

Everyone nods when you say “we need to improve quality”. But if you aren’t also taking about what you mean by “quality”, you‘re all just reaching for different pillows in the dark.

So the next time someone is talking to you about “quality”, maybe ask which kind of big they mean.

Are Your Quality Metrics Lying to You?

Susanne Abdelrahman — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 05:22:02 +0000

I came across this post by Olivia Teich about Dropbox Paper and it hit home. Olivia led Product for all collaborative products at Dropbox for a while and her reflection on Paper's failure stung because I lived through it.

Y’all, when I tell you Paper was Notion before there was Notion. Smh.

It was clean, thoughtfully designed, and cupcake (iykyk). I genuinely loved using it. (Who loves using software? 🙃

But while the product dashboards might have "looked impressive," the quality dashboards most definitely did not. Even when I joined Dropbox in 2016, at the height of investment in Paper, our quality metrics told a different story than the product metrics. And over time, the experience became less and less delightful, and Paper died slowly.

It reminded me of something written in 2024 but that I only came across recently, about how Google Search lost its soul. It happened by design (because they were optimizing for growth), and also unintentionally (because… who does that?).

Ed Zitron's piece, The Man Who Killed Google Search , details how Google deliberately optimized for the numbers that "mattered" while product quality and user trust seemingly became acceptable trade-offs.

This isn't new. Ask any QA person who's pushed for better product quality and gotten pushback because the tests were green, SLAs were met, velocity was high. You get the idea.

But poor product quality still bugs users, even when your metrics tell you that things are fine. And death by a thousand paper cuts is still death.

The Canary in the Coal Mine

In my interview with Ministry of Testing, I brought up an analogy that I like to use. If product development is a car, then QA used to be the brakes. We were good at stopping the car before the accident happened. Now we're looked at as the entire safety system: brakes, gear shifts, backup cameras, collision detection…

But maybe what we really need to be are the canaries in the coal mine. (I know, new metaphor.)

Quality folks see things breaking before anyone else. We notice when the product starts feeling *off*. But if our measurement systems (or the environments we’re working in) only reward green dashboards, then we can fall into that same trap of optimizing for metrics that make everyone feel good while the product slowly degrades.

Signs You're Optimizing for the Wrong Things

There are some indicators I’ve learned that signal you're optimizing for the wrong things:

Your metrics tell you about volume

Test count is up but coverage of critical paths is low (or unknown, more likely 🤔). Or bug triage is high but bug backlogs are constantly growing and your resolution rate is in the toilet.

Quality conversations happen in silos

When was the last time someone asked about quality in a roadmap meeting or a product review?

Your best insights come from production

If you’re regularly surprised by post-launch discoveries, your quality strategy is reactive.

Green dashboards exist alongside frustrated users

Are you setting your metric targets for what’s achievable with minimal effort, or for what’s actually good according to your users (and presumably, the people who pay your company money)?

What To Do Instead

Instead of measuring what's easy to count and easy to hit, measure what actually matters to your users.

Pair every metric with a story. What does this number mean? What's not showing up here? What would change our behavior if this metric moved?

Track risk. Bug severity trends. Regression patterns. Coverage gaps in areas that actually matter to users.

Make space for qualitative insights. It’s easy when something is obviously broken. But what about when something feels shaky or makes you nervous. What would you never recommend to a friend.

Push upstream. Those quality metrics should be influencing roadmaps or something. What’s your something?

Stop reporting success when the product isn't great. This is the hardest one. It means having uncomfortable conversations about why the dashboards look good but users are unhappy.

The Real Work

QA exists to make the product good. (And sustainable, and trustworthy, and sane to ship and support 💁‍♀️). That means choosing product integrity over performance theater, even when it's awkward.

Especially when it's awkward.

The breakthrough rarely shows up in data first. It shows up in the person who refuses to accept that "the metrics look fine" is a sufficient answer when the product feels wrong.

Your quality metrics should tell you whether you're building something worth building. If they can't do that, they're measuring compliance. And compliance never built a product anyone loved.

Found a Bug in the Wild. Also, a Racist.

Susanne Abdelrahman — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 13:50:10 +0000

Just got back from Aruba. It was amazing, 10/10. Island vibes, moonlit walks on the beach, blackjack, a bug report, and a casual racism sighting 💕

Cue the highlights.

Collection of vacation photos from Aruba: two pairs of feet with in wet beach sand; a gray dove perched on a black hotel balcony railing; a small blue-green lizard on brick pavers; reflection of a woman and beach landscape in floor-to-ceiling windows; bright red flowers blooming among green leaves; and a golden sunset view over the Caribbean with palm trees and white resort buildings in the foreground.

Bugs Are Everywhere

I found a bug in the wild! At a slot machine, no less. I tried to get it on video, but didn't hit the bonus round again before I hit my (very small) gambling limit.

The bug: Players who got 3 bonus wheels on a betting line would get some number of free spins. During free spins, the next spin would automatically happen until the limit was reached…. *unless* at least 1 wild icon showed up on a winning bet line. Then the player would need to intervene and tap the screen or press a button to "re-bet" and start the spins again. It only happened for these "wild" icons. I hit the bonus once and won free spins, wilds came up on many of the losing betting lines and it would be fine. But 3 times a wild came up on a winning bet line and and it happened every single time.

So it really was a bug-in-the-wild [icon]! I crack myself up 😂😂🤣

Now, a Less Delightful Discovery

At around 2 am one night, my husband and I are playing blackjack with a really lovely couple. We're joking around, vibing, winning. Having a great time. We start talking work, turns out he leads tech sales for an AI company. I mention that I work in quality engineering. After exchanging some shop talk, his wife turns to me, dead serious, and says: "Oh, lucky you. It's so much easier for you to get a job in tech as a woman!" But she was smiling, and I'm pretty sure she genuinely meant it?

Then, before I could collect myself and respond (and I was ready, too - I didn't need that long!) she started talking about a woman that her husband has worked with for years. A "great friend".

"Whenever she is looking for a new job, she finds one right away. And she's Asian, too, so… ya know. She checks a box."

Verbatim, y'all. The words imprinted into my brain. I was really proud that I kept my jaw from dropping to the floor.

(Also, not sure if you noticed, but I'm brown 💁‍♀️ so I'm sure there were similar implications there.)

But, y’all. She really believed it! She sat there for a beat, seemingly waiting for me to agree with her and say something like, "oh yeah, so easy!! Ya know, all that DEI helps 🙄". I'm assuming this, because of the way her expression changed when I smiled (not with my eyes), furrowed my eyebrows and told her: actually, nope! As a woman, I need to be twice as good at my job. Because there are people who think like you all over. Not only do I need to prove that I meet the bar at the interview, but then I need to continue to do it every damn day.

We went back and forth for a minute before my husband, smiling, suggested we cash out. Not sure if he was annoyed I was focusing more on the conversation than the game, or if he was just not trying to play with all of this bad juju around.

And y'all, as we were walking away we heard the dealer hit 21. The dealer's up-card was a 3. I giggled.

Two Kinds of Wild

Sometimes wild behavior is delightful. Sometimes it's exhausting.

Anyway, we had a great time in Aruba! Highly recommend. Just try and avoid the racists ✌️

The Missing README for Your Team

Susanne Abdelrahman — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 03:53:08 +0000

Before I get to the actual post, I need to pause.

The world feels like it’s burning right now. It kind of is? War, genocide, climate collapse, rights stripped away… Honestly some days I just want to hibernate and pretend everything is fine. But I know that would be useless, and I already struggle with a sense of futility so massive that I can’t even wrap my arms around it.

So, continuing to post here is kind of a small rebellion for me. A small way to keep doing things that bring me joy. A small way to fight against the voice that says none of it matters.

I don’t really post about politics, but I want to be extremely clear where I stand (❤️ inspired by Alex Maher’s recent LinkedIn post):

The lack of due process by ICE is unconstitutional and inhumane. Legal ≠ moral.

Making immigrant children represent themselves in court is disgusting.

People are always more important than property.

I love and support the peaceful protests happening around our country.

Deploying the National Guard and military to quell peaceful protests is egregious.

LGBTQ+ people deserve to exist safely and authentically

I want every child to have free breakfast and lunch at school. I’d rather my taxes pay for that than a parade to serve one man's ego.

I'm scared to send my children to school because it seems like people care more about access to guns than the safety of our kids.

The deaths on October 7th were horrific and the hostage crisis is ongoing. Acknowledging that doesn’t make you anti-Palestinian. It makes you human.

There is a genocide happening in Gaza. Speaking out about this tragedy does not make you antisemitic. It makes you human.

There’s more to say (always) but for now I’m starting here.

I was browsing MoT the other day (only a *tiny* bit embarrassed about the amount of time I spend doing that 🫠) when I came across this article by Maddy Kilsby-McMurray. It talked about how personal user manuals can help neurodiverse folks communicate their work preferences and needs, reducing the need to mask at work without having to disclose diagnosis details.

It reminded me of something we used to do at Dropbox, but for different reasons. Back when I joined, a few folks shared their "working with me" docs and encouraged me to write one, too. It wasn’t required but many senior folks across EPD had them. There was a basic template and some loose guidelines, but folks made them their own. Some included personality test results, others outlined their core values, and many shared about their lives outside work.

At the time, we were treating them mostly as nice-to-have team building tools and a low-pressure way to help teams feel more connected. But reading that article made me realize we'd been thinking about them in a pretty limiting way. We weren't really acknowledging how they could also be tools that help neurodiverse folks show up more authentically at work.

It has echoes of “accessibility benefit’s everyone”, no? When you create space for people to explicitly communicate their work preferences, you're helping neurodiverse teammates AND you're reducing guesswork and friction for the whole team.

I've had a "Working with Susanne" guide since my early Dropbox days. When I was an IC it was pretty straightforward. I wrote things about my preferences for written communication over impromptu chats and private feedback because public feedback (while appreciated!) makes me feel awkward 😅.

When I moved into management, my perspective on how to use this guide shifted. I wanted it to continue to serve as a place to explain how to best work with me, but also how I support my team. The way I communicated my flexible schedule shifted. Instead of "ignore my occasional emails outside work hours", I wrote "I have no expectation of your response outside normal working hours". It was the same boundary, but now I was clearly protecting my team instead of just myself. I also added things like "I succeed when my team succeeds" and "If you're feeling burned out, let me know so I can help" (full disclosure: some of these were lifted from the guides of leaders I looked up to 🤩). These were all things that I also said to my team, but having them written down made me even more accountable for how I actually showed up as a manager.

If you’re curious about creating something like this, I highly recommend checking out Maddy’s "manual of me" article and Manualof.me. And as an additional example here’s my own “working with me” guide.

Guide to working with me

If you’re worried about this veering into personal territory, try thinking about it from the perspective of "here's how we can all work better together" rather than "here are my special requirements". Starting small is an option, too - you can always expand it later. And if you end up creating one because of this post I'd love to hear how it goes.

What I'm Into Lately (New Page)

Susanne Abdelrahman — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 19:59:19 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about connection lately.

When I was working, I had a readily available community of people to connect with. There used to be better avenues to connect with like-minded folks online, too (R.I.P. old twitter). I miss opportunities that these communities provided for the kind of connection that happens when we discover something unexpected we have in common, like we both binged the same weird podcast or can't stop listening to the same song.

I've also been thinking about how, as I spend more time online, I sometimes feel like I'm managing different personas and my QA one is just a slice of who I am.

So I created a new page called Lately where I'll keep a running list of what's been catching my attention beyond the usual QA content. The rule (because I like rules 😆): only things I've already consumed, not the endless pile of stuff I plan to get to someday. Trying to keep it from turning into a bookmark graveyard.

Check it out and if something resonates or if you think I'd be into something I'm missing, reach out. I'd love to have more 'you have to check this out' conversations! ✨

Half -Baked, Fully Shipped: Quality is Care (and AI Can't Care)

Susanne Abdelrahman — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 14:49:47 +0000

Update: This post was inspired by my conversation about leading with quality with Rosie Sherry of MoT. You can watch the full interview here.

I was interviewed earlier this week by Rosie Sherry for a video series on Leading with Quality with MoT.

(Can we just pause here for a second? Because… Rosie Sherry? Interviewing me? Not to mention that the first video in the series was released and the guest is Lisa Crispin! I feel like I’m in the presence of testing royalty 👸

Whew. Ok.)

Before we started recording, Rosie mentioned something that's been stuck in my head since: "Community is care," she said, drawing a parallel to quality. "Quality is care”.

Quality is care.

Not quality needs care, or quality involves care. Quality *is* care.

And she’s right. It's a direct reflection of the intentional care we put into the software we build for the users we're building for. The more I think about this, the more it explains everything about why good software feels good and bad software feels... careless 🤷‍♀️.

When you’re using a product, you can tell whether the people who created it thought deeply about how you'd actually use it. Whether they considered the edge cases that would frustrate you. Whether they cared enough to make the error messages helpful instead of cryptic. Whether it was actually solving your problem rather than theirs 😬

This is why I'm not losing sleep over AI replacing QA (at least not in the way people seem to think). I do think that the tools we use will change and the way we work will evolve. Plenty of tasks we do now will get automated. But as long as teams are building software for humans, someone needs to care intentionally about quality. Someone needs to think about impact, context, and the human experience in ways that go beyond pattern matching.

Thats something that (at least for now 😅) ChatGPT and Claude and whatever flavor of AI you prefer just can’t do. Algorithms do what we tell them to do (nondeterministically in this case, but still…). They optimize for the goals we tell them to. They follow patterns from training data. The choice to prioritize user experience over shipping fast and make judgment calls about what "good enough" means for your specific context is human.

Quality is care.