Feedback from change may come in days, weeks, or months to managers– long enough to have a consequential impact on the team, delivery, culture, and more. The further you go up from the software team, the more you’re removed from the team’s day-to-day challenges, activities, and flow. But to steer your teams in the right direction, guard culture, and improve team health and engagement, you need visibility (observability). You need to be able to infer the state of your teams from the outside and be able to understand the state of things by looking at data.

The holy grail of leading with visibility is to be able to answer yes to all of the questions below:

1. Can you understand how stuff is being built?
2. Can you understand how stuff gets built on time and within budget?
3. Can you understand if the stuff built will continue to run?
4. Are the people building the stuff engaged and happy to take part in building the stuff being built?
5. Are your users getting value and satisfaction from what is being built?