[hn_throwaway_99]

I really liked this article, and I thought this statement hit the nail on the head: "Confusing how we do things with how we decide which things to do is a fatal mistake." I've worked at companies that practice what I call "thrash management" (constantly jumping from one priority to the next based on whichever fire happens to be burning brightest that day) and it's no fun, to put it mildly.

That said, once you build a system for operational metrics (i.e. what you need to detect anomalies that indicate outages, security concerns, etc.) you're already a huge way there towards having real-time analytics. I still wholeheartedly agree with the author that these real time metrics should only be in the service of operations, not product planning.