Fawaz Sheikh Aligns Cross-Functional Teams to Build Better Technology
In technology-driven roles, the moments that tend to stand out most come at the end, when a product launches, a system goes live, or a problem is officially solved. What receives far less attention is everything that happens beforehand, when teams are still deciding what they’re building and how they’ll work together to get there.
That early stage is where Fawaz Sheikh spends most of his energy. Based in Texas, Sheikh is an emerging technology professional with a background in engineering and a strong interest in connecting technology to real business needs.
While much of the industry is oriented around speed and output, he is more interested in how people communicate, make decisions, and work through differences when their priorities do not naturally line up.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, those interests became even more pronounced. After starting college in a new state and completing many of his classes remotely, Sheikh graduated feeling isolated, unmotivated, and uncertain about the future.
Spending so much time alone pushed him to look inward, leading him to set better boundaries, take care of his physical and mental health, and figure out what he wanted from both his life and career.
At the same time, he watched how quickly the world adjusted under pressure, as entire industries rethought long-standing ways of working almost overnight. Coming out of that experience, Sheikh began to see uncertainty less as a setback and more as a condition that requires communication, coordination, and clarity.
Resisting the Urge to Solve
When Sheikh starts working on a project, he avoids jumping straight into problem-solving. He has learned that moving too fast early on tends to cause confusion later, so he takes time to make sure everyone understands what they are building, why it matters, how success will be defined before the work begins.
That sets the direction for the rest of the project. When expectations are clear from the start, teams are less likely to pull in different directions or realize too late that they weren’t on the same page. People know their role, their responsibilities, and how their work fits into the bigger picture.
“I rely on structured documentation, regular check-ins, and written summaries to eliminate ambiguity,” Sheikh explained.
To support that, decisions are written down as they happen instead of being left to memory or side conversations. As the project evolves, those notes give the team something to look back on when questions come up.
Sheikh uses Slack and Microsoft Teams for everyday communication and quick updates, while project boards and shared documents are used to compile decisions, requirements, and updates in one place.
Meetings are run with a specific purpose in mind and end with defined next steps, ensuring conversations turn into action. After a project wraps up, post-project reviews give the team time to talk through what worked, what didn’t, and what could be done better next time.
Taken together, these habits allow Sheikh to stay organized, maintain momentum, and keep teams moving forward without unnecessary setbacks.
Turning Misalignment Into Movement
A large part of Sheikh’s work involves bringing together people who approach problems from very different angles. Engineers, designers, business leaders, and external partners often come into a project with their own priorities, constraints, and expectations.
If those differences aren’t addressed at the beginning, they can slow progress or push the work off track. Instead of assuming everyone is already aligned, Sheikh starts by creating shared understanding.
He takes the time to listen to each group, learn what they need, and understand the limits they’re working within. From there, he focuses on explaining requirements in plain terms to ensure expectations are consistent across teams.
“By clearly defining interfaces, dependencies, and timelines, teams can work in parallel without friction, strengthening collaboration and accelerating delivery,” he said.
How he communicates depends on who he’s speaking with. When working with engineers, Fawaz Sheikh focuses on technical details, system constraints, and trade-offs. With leadership and non-technical stakeholders, conversations turn toward outcomes, risks, timelines, and how success will be measured.
“My goal is to communicate at the right level of abstraction so decisions can be made efficiently,” he said.
That mindset proved especially important during a cross-functional software project that involved engineering, design, and external stakeholders working under tight deadlines. Sheikh served as a connector between technical and non-technical teams, turning high-level ideas into practical milestones while ensuring design decisions remained realistic from an engineering perspective.
By maintaining that balance, the team avoided unnecessary scope changes, limited rework, and delivered a polished mobile application on schedule.
Preserving Trust While Correcting Course
When timelines are tight or teams are spread across different locations, misalignment can happen even with strong communication. To reduce that risk, Sheikh puts extra emphasis on transparency and documentation, particularly with remote teams.
Key decisions, updates, and obstacles are recorded in shared tools rather than passed along informally. Frequent check-ins, defined responsibilities, and predictable workflows help keep everyone in sync, even in different time zones.
Even with those practices in place, Sheikh knows that misunderstandings are sometimes unavoidable. What matters most, in his view, is how they are handled.
When something isn’t clear, he addresses it right away, taking time to listen to the perspectives of everyone involved. He then looks for where expectations or assumptions may have broken down, whether in requirements, documentation, or handoffs.
Once the source of confusion is identified, Sheikh works to bring everyone back to the same understanding of the facts, constraints, and goals. That often means clarifying requirements, updating documentation, or adjusting how information is shared so the same issue is less likely to come up again.
“I view conflict as an opportunity to improve systems and communication rather than assign blame,” he shared. “By encouraging honest dialogue and co-creating solutions, I maintain respect and preserve strong relationships even in tense moments.”
The same goes for feedback. When giving feedback, Sheikh focuses on specific behaviors or deliverables and explains how they affect timelines, efficiency, or reliability. When feedback is directed toward him, he stays receptive, using what’s useful and treating it as part of ongoing growth rather than a personal critique.
By listening closely, asking follow-up questions, and reflecting back what he hears, Sheikh catches concerns, technical risks, and misaligned assumptions early, building shared understanding and trust within his teams.
Thinking Long Term in a Short-Term Industry
As Fawaz Sheikh has progressed in his career, his interest in technology has remained closely connected to his personal values. He doesn’t separate how he works from who he is. Instead, his faith and upbringing continuously guide his decisions, especially when the right choice isn’t obvious.
“In both settings, my faith and values guide me toward choices rooted in integrity, fairness, and long-term impact,” he shared. “When facing hard decisions, I reflect deeply on whether the outcome is ethically sound and sustainable, not just beneficial in the short term, ensuring I lead with conviction and accountability.”
Through his work, Sheikh has found a gap between how companies describe the problems they solve and how business owners operate on a daily basis. He’s seen how even well-intentioned tools can fall short when they aren’t designed around workflows, constraints, and decision-making pressures.
Those observations have made him more intentional about what he builds and why. Rather than creating tools for speed or efficiency alone, he’s motivated by technology that fits naturally into the way people work.
He believes better products come from listening, recognizing real needs, and designing around how tools are used in practice, not just in theory.
Inspired by Warren Buffet, Sheikh is drawn to the idea of growing a career patiently and responsibly, one that creates opportunity while allowing him to give back and support causes he cares about. For him, success isn’t defined by titles or milestones, but by the quality of the people around him and the positive impact he has on their lives.
As he looks ahead, those values remain central, guiding the choices he makes, the problems he chooses to work on, and the kind of work he wants to be known for.
