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I think I may get “Nines don’t matter if users aren’t happy” tattooed on my forehead. I just need to run it by my wife first.
OK, maybe I was being a bit overzealous.
But, really, great metrics aren’t the point. Users getting stuff done is.
And I feel like we all sometimes need a reminder for that.
After all, many of us have probably been on the receiving end of unhelpful reaction by companies to product failures. I claim that this is because common availability metrics are service-centric, not user-centric – and thus misleading and perhaps unhelpful.
Companies are tempted to claim they are “almost up” when they’re in fact down – for a subset of their users.
The larger the service becomes, the more tempting it is to ignore a small percentage of users experiencing defects or downtime.
It should behoove us to pay attention to such partial outages with the same sensitivity as a product-wide meltdown, because as far as the user is concerned, it is.
For many organisations, that’s a pretty stark change, especially because this perspective will inevitably make you look worse on paper.
But acting on this will make you look better in reality, and will make you visibly care – which is exactly how you get fiercely loyal users and (almost as a side effect) solid products.