“Outages haven't hurt us”
CTO · Observability
A CTO who says outages haven't hurt customers is weighing reliability against everything else on the roadmap, and right now it isn't winning. Don't try to scare them. Ask what nearly happened: which incident came closest to hurting customers, and how they found out about it.
Practise it before the real call
Free to start. No credit card.
What the buyer says
We had a few outages last year, but customers barely noticed. It's not a priority.
How to handle it
Listen
Hear "barely noticed" and "not a priority". Outages happen. The judgement is that the impact so far has been small.
Acknowledge
Agree that if outages haven't affected customers, other priorities can reasonably come first.
Explore
Ask about the incident that came closest to hurting customers: what happened, how they found out (from monitoring or from a customer), and how long it took to fix. Ask what would happen if the same thing occurred on their busiest day.
Respond
If they found out from customers, or recovery was slow, position your product around that. If their incidents really are small and quickly fixed, say so, and ask what would make reliability a priority.
Say this
“That's good to hear. Not every outage needs a new tool.”
Say this
“Which incident came closest to actually hurting customers?”
Say this
“How did you find out about it: from your monitoring, or from a customer?”
Variations
- VP Engineering: “Reliability is fine. Features are what we're behind on.”
- CEO: “Our customers aren't complaining, so it's not a problem.”
Questions people ask
How do you respond when a CTO says outages aren't a priority?
Don't try to scare them. Ask about the incident that came closest to hurting customers, how they found out about it and how long it took to fix, then position your product around what that reveals.
How do you sell observability to a company with few outages?
Focus on near misses and how incidents are discovered. Teams that find out about problems from customers, or that take a long time to find the cause, often see the value once they look closely at a recent incident.
More objections in Observability
- “Our monitoring bill keeps going up”
- “We can't send our logs to a vendor”
- “Teams won't instrument their code”
- “We already have three monitoring tools”
Practise it before the real call
Free to start. No credit card.