First I wrote the wrong book, then I wrote the right book (xpost)

Charity Majors shares the story of scrapping and rewriting a major section of her observability book after community feedback revealed she had written tactical advice for engineering teams when the real problem was strategic misalignment at the leadership level. After soliciting input from SREs, CTOs, VPs, and CISOs, she discovered that most observability failures stem from broken buying processes and lack of shared vocabulary between engineering and business stakeholders — not implementation challenges. The rewritten Part 6, 'Observability Governance,' is now structured for technical decision-makers and uses systems thinking language instead of jargon, covering topics from making the business case for observability to vendor partnerships and build-vs-buy decisions. The post also argues that observability is more critical than ever in an AI-native world, since organizational learning speed — enabled by observability — is now the primary constraint on engineering productivity.