From monitoring to mastery: Building an observability-driven culture

This talk explores how Phorest shifted to an observability-driven culture by aligning technical vision with customer pain, empowering teams through proactive ownership, and embedding observability into software practices to enhance customer trust.

In this talk, I’ll share the journey of transforming Phorest’s engineering culture to embrace observability at its core. Moving beyond traditional monitoring, we focused on embedding observability into how we build, monitor, and operate software, enabling proactive service health tracking and customer-centric improvements.

You’ll learn how we aligned technical vision with business priorities, rallied cross-functional teams, and introduced tools like OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb to unlock deep insights into production systems. Key highlights include creating a movement around our initiative, crafting impactful SLOs that reflect customer experience, and navigating challenges to foster accountability and ownership across teams.

Whether you’re a leader or practitioner, this talk will provide actionable insights into mapping business problems to technical vision, turning ideas into impactful cultural shifts, and empowering your organization to deliver software that performs seamlessly—because “we know before they call.”

Key takeaways

1. Mapping Business Problems to Technical Vision – Learn how to identify real customer pain points and translate them into a clear, actionable technical vision that drives organizational change.
2. Bringing Vision to Life – Discover practical tools, techniques, and strategies to turn a vision into a movement, from branding initiatives to empowering teams with the right tools and metrics.
3. Building Confidence for Change – Gain inspiration and confidence to lead cultural and technical shifts within your organization, with insights on overcoming challenges and creating lasting impact.
4. Customer-Centric Observability – Understand how aligning observability practices with customer experience through SLOs fosters better collaboration between engineering and product teams.
5. Proactive Service Health – Explore how shifting from reactive monitoring to proactive observability improves system reliability, reduces firefighting, and builds trust with your customers.