The Watchtower and the Magnifying Glass
A survey and interviews uncovered two very different personas and one thing they both wanted: to be alerted instead of keeping watch. That changed where the product was headed.
TL;DR
Picture an engineer staring at a wall of dashboards, waiting for something to turn red. For a long time that was the job monitoring tools were built around, and the working assumption was that our biggest customers were pretty happy with it. I led a team of four researchers through a large customer survey and in-depth interviews to find out what people open the tool to do. When we split the results by role, two personas showed up: Infra Operators, who watch everything (the Watchtower), and App Devs, who zoom in on one problem (the Magnifying Glass). They had different jobs and different frustrations, but underneath both was the same shift: nobody wanted to watch dashboards anymore. They wanted the tool to tell them when something needed them. That reframed the strategy around proactive help instead of passive watching, and around making the observability tools feel less like separate products and more like one connected, seamless system.
The big picture
How a satisfaction study became a strategy reset
On average, customers looked mostly happy, but the average was hiding the story. Split by role, the data showed two personas doing very different jobs:
- The Watchtower (Infra Operators) needs a view of the whole system to keep everything healthy.
- The Magnifying Glass (App Devs) needs to find the problem in their own code, fast.
What both personas wanted
The two personas experienced the same tools very differently, and a lot of that came down to how much jumping between tools their job required. Underneath, though, they wanted the same thing: less watching, and more of the tool doing the watching for them.
Where the tools fall away
When something broke, the tools were good at telling people something was wrong. The harder part came next, finding the cause, and that’s where confidence dropped. People wanted the path from “something’s off” to “here’s why” to feel like one connected flow, not a tour of several tools.
From finding to strategy
How one assumption became a new direction
What I almost missed
The average looked fine
The first pass looked at all the survey responses together, which is the standard move, and it told a story everyone would have happily accepted: mostly positive, no major issues. I almost presented it that way! Before any readout, though, I check whether the same data tells a different story when I slice it another way. Role wasn’t the obvious cut, but when I tried it, the tidy average fell apart, and the Watchtower and the Magnifying Glass turned out to be having very different experiences with the same product. “Users are happy” was true. It just wouldn’t have given anyone something to act on.
“I don’t want to stare at this dashboard. I want it to tell me when I need to look.”Senior Site Reliability Engineer, interview participant
Impact