Why an SRE Engineer Built a Product Validation Tool — Bringing Observability Thinking to Product Development

"Why Would an SRE Build a Product Tool?" I get asked this a lot. By day, I'm an SRE engineer at a fintech company. Terraform, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes — my job is keeping systems reliable. I think in dashboards, alerts, and incident response. But when I started building side projects, something felt deeply wrong. Infrastructure has observability. Product decisions don't. We use Datadog and Grafana to visualize system state as a matter of course. But "why did we build this feature?" and "was that decision correct?" — there's no dashboard for that. No alerts. No traces. That gap is what led me to build a hypothesis validation tool. And it turns out, SRE thinking translates surprisingly well to product development. The Observability Gap in Product Development The Three Pillars — Reframed In SRE, we think about observability through three pillars: Pillar In Infrastructure In Product Development Metrics CPU, memory, response time KPIs, usage rates, conversion Logs Access logs, error logs Deci