E154: Bringing OpenTelemetry to Mobile Observability
Nov 4, 2024
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Eric Futoran, Co-founder and CEO of Embrace, shares insights on revolutionizing mobile observability. He discusses the unique challenges in mobile engineering and why the industry needed specific tools. Eric explains the benefits of open-sourcing their SDKs, enhancing community engagement and code quality. He also delves into the importance of aligning product-market fit with GTM-market fit and how embracing OpenTelemetry transformed their approach. The conversation covers navigating marketing strategies and the evolution of user personas in the ever-changing SaaS landscape.
Embrace's creation of a mobile observability platform highlights the crucial need for seamless communication between engineers and product managers during development.
The decision to open source SDKs not only fostered community collaboration but also strategically positioned Embrace within the mobile observability ecosystem for greater influence.
Deep dives
Origins of Embrace
Embrace was founded by a seasoned entrepreneur who identified a significant gap in mobile observability tools while observing challenges faced by engineers. The founder's experience in creating successful gaming companies highlighted the disconnect between user experience issues and the tools available to engineering teams. Despite the presence of numerous analytics tools, none effectively facilitated communication between engineers and product managers regarding user issues, particularly on mobile platforms. This realization led to the decision to create Embrace, a mobile-first observability platform designed to unify data and language across teams in order to enhance user experience.
The Shift toward Observability
The evolving landscape of mobile development prompted a critical shift in the priorities of engineering teams, necessitating a focus on observability. As organizations transitioned to a mobile-first strategy, the relevance of DevOps teams in addressing user experience emerged, blurring roles and underscoring the importance of high-quality data access. The founder emphasized the need for a product that could consolidate critical data points such as metrics, logs, and traces, enabling teams to make informed decisions without delay. The emphasis on user timelines and transparency set Embrace apart, offering engineers the insights needed to pinpoint and resolve issues effectively.
Challenges of Market Fit
The journey to establish a robust market fit revealed that initial assumptions about target personas were misaligned with the broader customer needs. Early customer feedback indicated that product managers were often content with existing analytics solutions, overlooking the superior data insights offered by Embrace. This led the founder to pivot their strategy and focus on the technical personas of engineering teams, especially as their purchasing behaviors consolidated within organizations. Navigating this transition while maintaining growth posed challenges, necessitating a renewed approach toward understanding the evolving market dynamics and how to better address customer pain points.
The Importance of Open Source and Partnerships
The decision to open source the mobile SDKs stemmed from a desire to foster community collaboration and enhance code quality, even if initially resisted by the engineering team. Open sourcing aligned with strategic partnerships, such as those with major players in the observability space, which provided crucial insights into shared customer bases and collective challenges. The approach aimed to not only cultivate a development community but also establish Embrace's position within the ecosystem as a leader in mobile observability. By leveraging open telemetry and consistently seeking out strategic partnerships, Embrace positioned itself to drive innovation and respond effectively to industry demands.
Eric Futoran is Co-Founder & CEO of Embrace, the mobile observability platform built on OpenTelemetry.
Embrace has raised almost $80M from investors including NEA, Greycroft & Eniac.
In this episode, we dig into the creation of mobile observability as a category and how Embrace helped evangelize it, what makes mobile observability unique, why they open sourced their SDKs, how aligning with OpenTelemetry changed their trajectory, the difference between having product-market-fit and GTM-market-fit, shifting from just focusing on mobile teams to mobile + DevOps teams & more!
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