The effort of learning how to effectively make the case for observability to the management level is worth every minute of time and every ounce of sweat.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. One of the things the other developer relations advocates here at New Relic and I often hear from customers is, „Even though I understand why observability is important, I’m having a dickens* of a time getting leadership to buy in (literally).“ Let me begin by pointing out how important it is for us — IT practitioners — to be willing and able to speak to management and leaders of the business about the work we do, and to do so in a way that is understandable and meaningful to the audience. I’m not implying you have to explain observability in a patronizing „explain it like they’re five“ kind of way. I mean you need to explain the WHY of observability in the context of what the audience feels is important. I’m presuming YOU already understand why observability is important — to you, to your team, to your applications, to your network infrastructure, and more. My goal here isn’t to write one more DevOps- and SRE-centric love letter to (and about) observability. We already have plenty of those. The question at hand is, „How can I convince my boss to prioritize observability?“ The key to answering the question lies in where the emphasis of that sentence is. For starters, I need to underscore that this is your boss we’re focusing on. Not my boss. Not bosses everywhere. And not your boss‘ boss (at least not yet). And so I have to ask you to think for a moment about what motivates, drives, and convinces your boss about anything. Maybe they’re motivated by technical ideas or ideals. Now, I want to be clear: this isn’t the same as saying „my boss is technical.“ I’ve known plenty of leaders who, themselves, are incredibly non-technical but nevertheless are deeply intrigued with, and convinced by, technical arguments and justifications. Equally, I’ve seen a fair number of managers who are skilled technologists but nevertheless absolutely refuse to make business decisions based on the technical merit of a particular option. If your manager is motivated by technical ideas and arguments, you’ve got it made! In fact, you probably aren’t still reading this article. You — the IT practitioner with deep experience in observability — can simply lay out the many benefits (to the manager individually, to the projects currently in flight, to their team, and to the organization at-large): Or you can just say, „Ultimately, the goal of observability is to enable teams to take action with shared data. Connect people with processes and technology performance across the entire organization and tie it to specific business outcomes.“ After doing so, your manager will nod their head sagely, murmur appreciatively, „Yes, yes of course that’s exactly it,“ after which they will approve every request you place in front of them.
