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by Alison Fragale PhD

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As a result, we invest a lot in the reliability of our application. But unpredictable failures are inevitable, and when they happen it’s humans that fix them.

We operate a socio-technical system, and its ability to recover when faced with adversity is called resilience. One of the crucial components of resilience is observability, the steps we take to enable humans to “look” inside the systems they run.

This post will explore the road to building a stronger culture of observability, and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

What do we mean by observability?

At Interlock

, we ship to learn. Our production environment is where our code, infrastructure, third-party dependencies, and our customers come together to create an objective reality – it’s the only place to learn and validate the impact of our work. We define observability as a continuous process of humans asking questions about production, and getting answers*.

Let’s break that down a little more:

• Continuous process: Successful observability means that folks observe as frequently as possible.

• Questions about production: We wanted our definition to be wide, generic, and representative of the broad scope of workflows we cater for.

• Answers*: Note the asterisk. No tool will give you answers, only offer leads you can follow to find the real answers. You have to use your own mental models and understanding of the systems you run.

Stage 1: Problem and solution

Armed with our own definition of observability, we assessed our existing practices and formulated a problem statement. Until recently, our observability tooling has been primarily based on metrics. A typical workflow involved looking at a dashboard full of charts with metrics sliced and diced by various attribute combinations. Folks would look for correlations but often leave without fulfilling insights.

“Metrics are easy to add and understand, but they are missing high-cardinality attributes (e.g. Customer ID), making it difficult to complete an investigation”

The journey towards effective automation begins with a clear assessment of current workflows. Pinpointing the bottlenecks and time drains is essential. Companies that have embraced automation find that it's not about replacing the human element, but rather enhancing it, allowing staff to focus on strategic tasks that require a human touch — thus optimizing the overall workflow.

Implementing automation does not come without its challenges. It requires a thoughtful approach that considers the potential for disruption and the learning curve for employees. However, the payoff can be substantial. Businesses that successfully automate experience not only a boost in productivity but also often see an increase in employee satisfaction as staff are relieved of mundane tasks and are able to engage in more meaningful work.

Onboarding is critical to the success of your product

At Interlock, we aim to deliver outcomes. Without an accessible onboarding process, customers may never reach the stage where they can use the game-changing features your team has worked so hard to build, making outcomes difficult to achieve.

Focusing on the onboarding process at the beginning of new product development is critical to overcoming this. This is especially true when you’re building for mid-market and enterprise customers. Businesses use buying committees to make the decision to use a new product. These committees are essential, even if the product is free, because every new product necessitates a process change.

“As companies get larger, process changes impact more people, and the buying committee tends to grow”

In a small startup, the “committee” could be a single person. But as companies get larger, process changes impact more people, and the buying committee tends to grow. Larger buying committees mean more people and steps involved.

It’s easy for customers to stop onboarding at any hurdle the buying committee experiences. At best, poorly thought out onboarding could mean customers take weeks or months to start using a new product. At worst, a poor onboarding experience could prevent them from ever getting started.

We experienced this first-hand while building our WhatsApp integration. In the early days of the beta, we realized it was taking a long time for customers to get started – with no clear answers as to why.

“We had spent the majority of our time focusing on day-to-day features customers would love, but not the processes they would need to go through”

I came to Interlock from a company with a culture of heavyweight engineering processes. It was a well-oiled machine with battle-tested and often updated procedures.

From an engineering perspective, it successfully kept you focused on coding. Tasks were always well-described in Jira, and included clearly defined expectations. Designs came in and were exported to HTML so you didn’t have to worry about using Sketch. You did your job, then moved the task to QA. If something came back, it was always with a good description of what wasn’t working.

When I started at InterLock, however, I was surprised at how lightweight the weekly engineering processes felt compared to my previous company. No estimations. No Jira. No separate QA team. Initially, I felt overwhelmed. I wondered why it looked this way, why everyone just aligned and no one tried to structure the processes as I was used to.

“Processes have to serve the development of the product”

The main reason is that in both of these companies, there were different problems to solve, even though it looked similar on the surface. Interlock is very much a product-first company, and very heavyweight processes can be too much of a constraint in a product-first company. In this sort of environment, the processes have to serve the development of the product, rather than the product developing out of predetermined processes.

At Interlock, we have a very strong culture of solving the right problems. We are ruthless in defining what the true problem is, how we solve it using a small, well-scoped project (or a cupcake, as we like to call them), and how it might eventually look like if the cupcake proves to be successful.

In short, we ask what is the problem and how will you measure that it’s solved. And we don’t just use this approach when working on our products – we try to apply the same approach whenever we want to add new or adjust existing engineering processes.

The subconscious benefit of processes

In any organization, processes are important and beneficial. They streamline the workflows, help people make fewer mistakes and bring some degree of comfort – having a good set of processes can create the sense that work has already begun to proceed.

Advancements in data analytics and machine learning have provided the tools necessary to dissect large volumes of customer data, extracting actionable insights. These insights empower businesses to deliver personalized recommendations and solutions, significantly enhancing the customer journey. A customer's interaction with a brand becomes more meaningful when the content they receive is aligned with their past behavior, interests, and predicted needs.

However, with great power comes great responsibility. In the age of personalization, privacy concerns stand at the forefront. Companies are tasked with striking a delicate balance between delivering personalized experiences and maintaining customer trust. Transparency in data usage and giving control back to the users are crucial steps in fostering a relationship where personalization leads to improved customer loyalty and business growth.