Frontend Engineering and Design South Africa (FEDSA)

Cockpits & Dashboards: Aviation Lessons for Measuring What Matters

Mon, Jul 13 · 6:00 PM SAST

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Online

Online

👀 FEDSA is moving to Luma
To ensure the long-term sustainability of our volunteer-run community, FEDSA will be moving all future events from Meetup to Luma.

👉 Please get the YouTube link for this event, pls RSVP to the event on Luma.

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Our Meetup will be retired on 4 July 2026, so we encourage all members to make the move now.

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✈️ Cockpits & Dashboards: Aviation Lessons for Measuring What Matters
Fiona McCarthy spent twenty years in aviation operations before she co-founded a digital radio platform with no algorithm training and no playbook. What she brought instead was a habit from an industry where bad instrumentation didn't mean a bad quarter; it meant an investigation.
​When she got into digital media, she went looking for the same discipline aviation uses to decide what a pilot actually needs to see, and couldn't find it. She found an industry measuring more than ever and understanding less. Counting reach, impressions and time-on-page while trust quietly hit an all-time low.
​This talk is about that gap, and six new instruments she believes could close it: measures for things the dashboard can't see, like whether people came back because they chose to, or whether anything actually changed. Half of these signals are unsolved engineering problems. Fiona is not here to tell you she's cracked it. She is here because you might.

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🗣️ ​About the speaker
​Fiona McCarthy spent over twenty years in aviation, helping build medical evacuation networks and humanitarian air operations across Africa. They led international panels on how civilian crews were often the real backbone behind military missions on the continent, navigating high-stakes logistics that made debugging look easy.

​After watching aviation evolve from hands-on flying to drones and complex automation, they pivoted into digital media, co-founding a fast-growing digital-first radio platform despite having no radio or marketing background.
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Their outsider perspective revealed how digital tools often miss real human behaviour, and they now focus on how developers can design tech that measures authenticity, not vanity metrics.

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​What is FEDSA?
​Front-end & Design South Africa (FEDSA) is a registered non-profit organisation that serves as an administrative umbrella for various projects that advance knowledge-sharing between practitioners and aspiring practitioners within the industry.

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