[By Andy Bold]
In the fast-paced world of software development, organisations face a constant balancing act between delivering new features and maintaining system health. For many companies, especially those in growth mode, observability often takes a back seat to feature development—and for understandable reasons. This post explores how organisations can navigate the journey from treating observability as an afterthought to making it a competitive advantage, without sacrificing the business imperatives that drive growth.
The reality of business priorities
Let’s start with an honest acknowledgment: when you’re building a business, customer acquisition and retention are paramount. Every engineering hour spent on non-customer-facing work is an hour not spent on features that could attract new users or delight existing ones. This isn’t short-sightedness—it’s survival.
For start-ups and growing companies, the calculation is straightforward. That new feature might be the difference between closing a major enterprise deal or losing it to a competitor. The improved user experience could be what turns trial users into paying customers. In this context, investing heavily in observability infrastructure can feel like a luxury the business can’t afford.
This prioritisation makes perfect sense. After all, the most sophisticated monitoring system in the world won’t matter if the business fails to achieve product-market fit or runs out of runway. Organisations that focus intensely on feature delivery during their growth phase are making a rational choice based on immediate business needs.
When observability becomes critical
However, as systems grow and customer bases expand, the lack of observability begins to manifest in increasingly painful ways. What starts as occasional debugging challenges evolves into systematic problems that threaten the very growth the organisation has worked so hard to achieve.
The symptoms are familiar to anyone who’s worked in a rapidly scaling environment:
- Longer incident resolution times: Without proper observability, what should be a 15-minute fix becomes a multi-hour archaeological expedition through logs and code. Engineers spend more time finding problems than fixing them.
- Cascading failures: When you can’t see how services interact, a minor issue in one component can trigger unexpected failures elsewhere. These surprises erode customer trust and team morale.
- Performance degradation: Systems slow down gradually, but without metrics, you don’t notice until customers complain. By then, the user experience has already suffered.
- Inability to scale efficiently: Without visibility into resource usage and bottlenecks, scaling becomes a guessing game. Teams either over-provision (wasting money) or under-provision (risking outages).
The hidden costs of observability debt
Like technical debt, observability debt accumulates interest over time. The costs, however, aren’t always immediately visible on a balance sheet.
- Developer productivity suffers dramatically when engineers spend hours or days tracking down issues that proper monitoring would have surfaced immediately. This isn’t just about the time lost—it’s about the context switching, the frustration, and the opportunity cost of not working on valuable features.
- Customer experience degrades in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to feel. Users don’t care why your application is slow or why that critical feature failed—they just know it did. Without observability, you’re often the last to know about problems, learning about them from angry customer emails or social media posts.
- Team burnout becomes a real risk when engineers are constantly fighting fires without the tools to prevent them. The stress of not knowing what’s happening in production, combined with the pressure to maintain system reliability, creates an unsustainable working environment.
- Business agility decreases when teams become afraid to make changes. Without confidence in their ability to detect and diagnose problems, engineers naturally become more conservative, slowing down the very innovation that drove initial growth.
Building observability without stopping the business
The good news is that organisations don’t need to halt feature development to address observability debt. The key is to approach it strategically, building observability incrementally while maintaining business momentum.
Start with critical user journeys
Instead of trying to instrument everything at once, begin with the pathways that matter most to your business. Identify the critical user journeys—signup, checkout, core feature usage—and ensure you have visibility into these flows first. This approach provides immediate value while keeping the effort manageable.
Embed observability into feature development
Rather than treating observability as a separate initiative, make it part of the feature development process. When building new features, include basic instrumentation as part of the definition of done. This doesn’t add significant overhead but ensures new code doesn’t add to the observability debt.
Use the 80/20 rule
Focus on the 20% of metrics that provide 80% of the value. For most applications, this means:
- Basic availability monitoring (is it up?)
- Key performance indicators (response times, error rates)
- Business metrics (user actions, conversion rates)
- Resource utilisation (CPU, memory, database connections)
You can always add more sophisticated monitoring later, but these fundamentals will catch most issues.
Leverage existing tools and standards
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Modern observability platforms and open standards like OpenTelemetry can dramatically reduce implementation time. Cloud providers offer built-in monitoring capabilities that, while not perfect, provide a solid starting point.
Make it incremental
Treat observability improvements like any other feature—break them into small, deliverable chunks. Maybe this sprint you add error tracking to the payment service. Next sprint, you instrument the API gateway. Each small improvement adds value without requiring a massive upfront investment.
Creating a culture of observability
Technology alone won’t solve the observability challenge. Organisations need to foster a culture where visibility into system behaviour is valued and prioritised.
- Make data accessible: Ensure all team members, not just ops engineers, can access and understand monitoring data. When everyone can see system behaviour, everyone becomes invested in maintaining system health.
- Celebrate observability wins: When good monitoring prevents an outage or speeds up debugging, acknowledge it. These victories help build organisational buy-in for continued investment.
- Include observability in planning: During feature planning, ask “How will we know if this is working correctly?” Making this question routine ensures observability becomes part of the development mindset.
- Share the responsibility: Observability shouldn’t be one team’s job. When developers own the observability of their services, they’re incentivised to build systems that are easier to monitor and debug.
The path forward
Organisations that successfully navigate from observability-as-afterthought to observability-as-advantage share several characteristics:
They acknowledge the trade-offs without judgment. They understand why observability was deprioritised and don’t waste energy on blame or regret.
They start where they are, not where they wish they were. Instead of designing the perfect observability system, they focus on incremental improvements that provide immediate value.
They align observability with business goals. By connecting monitoring to customer experience and business metrics, they ensure continued investment and support.
They invest in both tools and culture. They recognise that sustainable observability requires not just technology but also processes and mindsets that value visibility.
Conclusion
The journey from treating observability as an afterthought to making it a competitive advantage doesn’t happen overnight. It requires patience, strategy, and a recognition that perfect is the enemy of good.
Organisations shouldn’t feel guilty about prioritizing feature delivery during growth phases—this focus is often what enables success in the first place. However, as systems and teams scale, the lack of observability becomes a limiting factor that can undermine the very growth it was sacrificed for.
The key is to recognise when that inflection point approaches and to address observability debt strategically. By starting small, focusing on value, and building incrementally, organisations can improve their observability posture without sacrificing the feature velocity that drives their business.
In the end, good observability isn’t about having perfect visibility into every aspect of your system. It’s about having enough visibility to confidently deliver value to customers while maintaining the agility to grow and adapt. For organisations willing to invest thoughtfully in this journey, observability transforms from a necessary evil into a powerful enabler of sustainable growth.
