Beyond Crash Reports: Why Observability Is a Business Imperative
Article Summary
Andrew Tunall, President of Embrace, makes a bold claim: your app's biggest retention killer isn't crashes. It's the performance issues you're not even tracking.
In this Build to Succeed podcast episode, Tunall draws on his product leadership experience at New Relic and AWS to explain why observability has evolved from a nice-to-have developer tool into a core product strategy. He shares how subtle performance issues silently erode user engagement long before teams notice.
Key Takeaways
- Performance problems go unnoticed until engagement drops without proper observability tooling
- Shared context between frontend and backend teams builds resilient technology
- OpenTelemetry standardizes telemetry data collection across distributed systems
- Hire fewer people but ensure top performers with high ownership
- Developer-focused companies need engineering backgrounds at senior leadership levels
Observability isn't just about fixing crashes: it's about connecting small delays to big business impacts before users churn.
About This Article
Frontend teams and backend teams often work in silos. Performance problems stay hidden until user engagement metrics start dropping.
Embrace uses observability practices like OpenTelemetry to collect telemetry data consistently across distributed systems. This creates shared accountability between product and engineering teams.
Organizations that build observability into their culture can move faster and experiment without damaging user trust. Observability becomes a product advantage instead of just a backend concern.