Most dashboards are built to give leadership a sense of control over a complex system. Stephen Townshend — who led platform services at IAG in New Zealand at the time of this conversation, and hosts the Slight Reliability podcast — thinks that sense of control is often an illusion.
He talks through the executive dashboard his team built that nobody could actually act on, why engineers quietly build "shadow networks" that route around official escalation, why clean boundaries between teams and systems can be a comforting fiction, and why mean time to recovery is a more misleading metric than most teams realise.
If we're not using data to make decisions, then it's not valuable.
Having clear boundaries between different components in these complex systems that we build — it's an illusion. It gives us a sense of control, but we don't actually have any.
It's very easy to track things like mean time to recovery, which have now been shown to be mathematically flawed.
Chapters
- 0:01:28 — Stephen's path from performance engineering to SRE
- 0:04:15 — The executive dashboard nobody could act on
- 0:07:47 — The two kinds of value in observability data
- 0:10:24 — Why documented rationale beats perfect documentation
- 0:14:14 — Shadow networks: how big orgs really route around blockers
- 0:18:39 — Why clear boundaries between teams can be an illusion
- 0:20:22 — MTTR and the problem with mean-based incident metrics
- 0:24:20 — Where Stephen still doesn't trust AI with a decision
