I built this on nights and weekends to learn a stack I keep making decisions about but rarely touch with my own hands. Sharing what I learned in case it's useful to anyone doing the same.
I'm a principal product manager, and I've spent more nights than I'd like on incident bridges — watching a service degrade in real time, then writing the document that goes to the customer afterward: here's what broke, here's how long, here's what we're doing so it doesn't happen again. Owning that accountability up close teaches you something the dashboards don't: the hardest question isn't "what happened" — it's "what do we owe, and can we prove it?"
Building integrations is my actual job, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about the teams on the other side of an outage — the people who have to turn an incident into a number a customer will accept. And the same pains kept showing up. Getting the data is a scavenger hunt across systems that were never built to agree. Asking "what if we'd classified this differently" means re-running everything by hand, so nobody does until they're forced to. When a customer disputes the number, "I think so" is the most honest answer anyone can give — on the one topic where you can least afford it: money owed. And when a contract or a severity turns out to have been wrong, correcting a credit you already settled is a mess nobody wants to touch.
