From Reactive to Proactive: My “Light Bulb” Moment With Monitoring

About ten years into my career, I had one of those rare light bulb moments that completely reshaped how I approached engineering. Until then, I’d mostly thought of my role in terms of building features, fixing bugs, and keeping things moving. But thanks to a push from a colleague in product, I began to see things differently — not just as an engineer, but as someone responsible for the experience of real people using what we built.

The Situation

This colleague had a knack for never being satisfied with hand-wavy theories or gut feelings. She always pushed for data. “What does the data say?” became the underlying challenge in every discussion.

At first, it was frustrating. But then it clicked: she wasn’t just asking for numbers, she was asking us to think from the customer’s perspective. Customers don’t care about our theories — they care about what works, what doesn’t, and how quickly we fix it.

That’s when I saw a huge gap in how we handled one of our most critical features: the job application workflow. If an applicant hit an error while trying to apply, they often had no way of telling us. Recruiters or internal users would eventually report problems, but applicants? They just quietly disappeared. That silence was dangerous.

The Task

We needed to know when things were breaking as they were breaking — not hours or days later when someone finally filed a bug report. If applicants couldn’t apply, that was a business-critical failure.

The Action

I wrapped the entire application workflow in logging. Every step, every possible error condition, every user-facing failure got tracked. Then I built dashboards and alerts in Splunk — our company’s logging and metrics tool.

Instead of hoping we’d find out when something broke, we gave ourselves visibility. If an applicant saw an error, we’d see it too. And if the errors hit a certain threshold, an alert would trigger right away.

It wasn’t flashy work. Nobody celebrates a dashboard the way they celebrate a new feature launch. But it fundamentally changed how our team operated.

The Result

The shift was immediate. Suddenly, we weren’t waiting for customers to tell us what was broken. We could respond in real time. We became proactive rather than reactive.

My manager recognized the impact, and as the team lead, I could see how much stronger it made us. For me personally, it was the moment I stopped thinking only like an engineer and started thinking like a steward of the customer experience.

Over time, this mindset became a cornerstone of my career. Today, I don’t design or ship a feature without asking myself: How will we monitor this? How will we know if it fails? Because the worst thing you can do is ship something to production, have it break silently, and then wait for someone else to point it out.

What I Learned

• Data is perspective. Being data-driven isn’t about numbers for their own sake — it’s about seeing the product through the customer’s eyes.
• Monitoring is respect. If you’re building for others, you owe it to them to know when your work is failing, not to wait until they complain.
• Leadership means proactivity. This wasn’t just a technical win — it was a cultural one. It built trust, improved morale, and changed how our team approached quality.

This experience turned me from an engineer who shipped features into a leader who thinks about the experience those features create. And all it took was a light bulb moment, some dashboards, and a colleague who refused to accept “theory” as an answer.