Speaker: Jessica Kerr

When we want to go fast, it helps to see what we are doing.

When we design team and departmental processes, we want to know what’s happening in the software teams. We want to see danger points and obstacles we could smooth. It’s tempting to ask people to fill more fields in JIRA, but that adds burden and distorts reality.

There’s another side of the team we can see into without distortion, if we set it up: the software itself.

Look at the software as part of the team, and observability in the software becomes an asset to organizing teams. We can see:

• what’s happening in production
• the flow through CI/CD
• coordination points, connections between software that needs connection between teams
• when it’s time to shift focus between features and reliability

Visibility into production behavior benefits product planning, organization design, and business decisions. With observability, we can get the software to help us change it smoothly and safely.