May 19, 2021
Alerting Part 1: What you need to get started
You’ve decided to join 100+ operational leaders at companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Oscar Health, Square, and made the decision to use alerts to manage business operations. Great!
Before you can get started, you need to have a few things in place.
Data
As the famous saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out”. To make your data operational, you want to ensure that is
- Centralized: warehouses like Snowflake, Redshift increasingly house operational, not just analytical data.
- Accessible: Get read-permissions to these central sources of information.
- Clean and reliable: Set up data pipelines to ensure it’s clean and in the right format, and is actionable.
- Fresh: Make sure the data is updated at a cadence that makes sense for the operations you’re tracking.
Business goals
Your data is only as good as your goals, so make sure you’re managing to the right metrics. Business users, product managers and engineering might all need to be kept in the loop. Create a staffing plan for who will monitor and respond to the alerts. You’ll also need a way to maintain the system over time and flexibly update it as your business grows.
Once you have your input data in one place and goals defined, be wary of siloing logic by writing your marketing rules in Marketo and sales rules in Salesforce. Use an application-agnostic tool to manage rules to make sure your rules can run in coordination (no customer wants to receive five emails in one day), are auditable and can be optimized in total.
Don’t let the seams in your company and tools become the seams in your customer’s experience!
Once you have the tools and the will, you’re ready to start monitoring things! Here’s how to decide what to monitor.
