Observability is literally about seeing. Most marketing ops teams are feeling their way in the dark. Systems and processes are not fully documented, change management is generally inadequate across web, marketing and sales ops teams, and SaaS vendors aren’t as transparent as they could be about outages and incidents, and remediation plans.
So when markops pros first grasp the idea of revenue observability, they get excited. And they start imagining how it fits into their current flow.
What’s it like once you start shedding some light on your stack? How does it change your approach to your work? At Stack Moxie we have a few different ways to describe a day in the life of an operations team with stack observability. We can talk about staff augmentation with agents, or reducing manual QA steps with automation. Lately I’ve been using an analogy of three different light sources, and it seems to resonate, so I’m sharing it here. You can think of it as a crawl-walk-run, but it’s less of a maturity curve, and more like three different modes of seeing.
I call them: Candlelight, Searchlight, and Daylight.
Candlelight: See what’s in front of you
The most obvious way to begin with observability is to start with what you’re working on right now: What’s on your desk, your screen, your task list. Just like a candle sheds light on what’s right in front of you, observability tools can bring visibility and insights on demand, for the task at hand.
Stack Moxie gives you a code-free, drag and drop UI for creating agents that can run a test and return a result, usually in seconds. That can give you the answer you need to get around what’s blocking you from finishing your task.
Examples of questions you can ask in Candlelight
- Does this new landing page have the right form and pixels on it?
- Is my new campaign error-free and ready to ship?
- Is this app still integrated and sharing with the CRM?
- Are my DKIM, SPF, and DMARC set up properly on this new subdomain?
- Are leads getting routed properly to the new sales territories?
Searchlight: Investigate and diagnose
When you need to diagnose an incident or potential issue, a searchlight is your best option. Point it anywhere to get a bright and focused answer about any part of your stack.
Examples of questions you can ask in Searchlight
- Some of our leads are missing lead source and opt-in data: Where are they coming from?
- What’s my email spam abuse rate for the day?
- Is our domain on any spam blocklists?
- Is our content consent process compliant with GDPR and CCPA?
- Does our data privacy process actually follow our published Privacy Policy?
Daylight: Get a holistic understanding
Candlelight and Searchlight give you visibility into what you know you want to see. Daylight exposes the unknowns: What is it that you may not have otherwise thought to look at?
When you can see your full revenue stack and lifecycle in a comprehensive view, you get an understanding you can’t get just by knowing where to look.
Examples of questions you can ask in Daylight
- How many forms do we have on our website?
- Are any of them broken or misconfigured?
- Do any of them feed campaigns that have ended?
- Are they properly collecting UTMs?
- Are there times of the day or week that we’re maxing out our API limits?
- Can you let me know if the pixels or scripts change on any indexed pages on our website?
- Which pages on our website have potential compliance issues for accessibility?
- What percentage of our leads are failing to route properly and on time?
- What’s the average speed of a lead from form fill on the website to task created for an SDR?
- What’s the average availability of our complete revenue stack, including system uptime, API connectivity, and data sync?
Ready to move from candlelight to daylight?
Whether you’re just getting started or you’re ready to go full visibility mode, Stack Moxie makes it easy to see what’s really going on in your stack.
Get a free account or schedule a live demo to explore what observability can unlock for your team.
