How we built an Alert Management System using an OKR-based approach?
OKR-based approach enriches businesses with products built with clear-cut objectives accomplished by well-defined key results.
Agile methodologies and tools assist in accomplishing OKR based approach in building successful products benefitting both businesses and customers.
How we started our Journey to build an Alert Management System?
We started our journey using OKR based approach to build an Alert Management System. During the kick-off meeting, the product and engineering team along with our customers brainstormed on what defines an alert management system along with its capabilities.
For phase 1, we wanted to build an events API that captures failed events. Once the events were captured, the Alert lifecycle kick starts with self-assigned severity and other relevant metadata coming from the event. Alerts were then enabled with actionable APIs to act on the alerts with proper authorization and access control. The User Interface provided the alert dashboard for teams to act on the alerts coming from their managed tools. Along with the API, some of the basic metrics like Mean Time To Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time To Resolve(MTTR) were captured to measure the tool's efficacy and also the team’s management of failed events.
What were the pros and cons we faced after delivering phase 1 of Alert Management System?
Since we started involving our customers every step of the way, we were able to build the exact product our customers were looking for. We also became our own customer for the alert management system by registering our tool’s bad events. The performance metrics were sent to the management on a weekly basis detailing how many bad events were triggered by different tools and how much time the team took to resolve those issues. Visualizing the ROI helped expand the customer base for the alert management system.
Along with the pros we also dealt with some of the cons like contradicting customer requests for changing the alert behavior based on their tool.
How we enhanced the Alert Management System with OKR-based approach?
Since we started the project with a well-defined alert system, we were able to convince our customers about how an alert management system should work. At the same time, we started analyzing the problem statements raised by our customers. For instance, some of our customers were referring to the alert system as just a notification system that alerts the respective team. After strategizing the problem statement along with competitive market analysis, we started building the roadmap for phase 2 which included a notification system based on alert severity.
Phase 2 of the alert management system included a notification system that can notify customers via email, SMS, and Pagerduty based on the alert’s severity.
Using well-defined objectives and key results, we were able to deliver a notification system for phase 2 and automate actionable alerts for phase 3.
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