A baptism of fire
A few days after joining Canonical, after some intensive onboarding by our then product manager, Michele Mancioppi, I found myself presenting the Observability team’s roadmap at a product sprint. We were still isolating because of COVID at that point, so the sprint happened remotely.
I was still new enough to have more confidence than context, which is probably a familiar feeling for anyone who has been part of multiple complex engineering organizations. After all, they can look similar at the surface level, but once you dig down, the differences quickly accumulate.
That first cycle quickly taught me what Observability at Canonical would be like: technically deep, distributed across many products and teams, shaped by different goals, incentives and constraints, full of sharp people and rarely reducible to a tidy plan.
What Observability taught me
Most work at Canonical is hard from a technical standpoint, and the organization takes real pride in solving problems that are ambiguous, unsolved, and have a positive impact across the open-source ecosystem. Observability was no exception. We have often found ourselves navigating emerging problem spaces where no established solution was available, and where we had to reason from first principles more often than we could follow an existing playbook.
Add to that the massive footprint of Ubuntu and Canonical’s relatively focused size, and it becomes clear that coordination, ownership, prioritization, and translation across teams are not just nice to have, but pivotal to delivery.
For me, that became one of the central lessons of the role: the work is not only about telemetry, dashboards, alerts, or traces. They all matter, but only become useful when they connect to how teams make decisions, understand failures, operate services, and learn from production. The technical system and the organizational system are less separable than they may look.
That becomes even more obvious when the teams you are trying to serve are not only inside your own organization, but also customers, partners, and community users with very different contexts and constraints.
What I am proud of
The team, really. Prior to Canonical, I never had the chance to work with such a knowledgeable, engaged, and reliable group of people. We managed to build a team that people wanted to be part of: a place with high standards, real technical depth, and enough trust that people could do difficult work without turning it into performative process.
In these five years, we also moved the offering forward substantially. It became more capable, more integrated across Canonical’s product portfolio, and more mature, not just as a set of tools but as a shared discipline. For us, Observability was not only a functional trait. It became a demonstrable quality with measurable maturity, supported by a framework for understanding where products and teams were, where they needed to go, and what tradeoffs were involved.
Leaving a strong team
In the past, when I have left an organization, I have often felt a bit worried about what would happen to the team and where their story would go next. This time, I am not. Everything we have been building together has been aimed at creating a strong sense of ownership, agency and accountability. We have not been doing this to please a manager or reporting chain. We have been doing this because we believe in the mission, and because we believe the work matters beyond the immediate team.
That also means that while there might be some initial turbulence while figuring out what comes next, my handover has mainly been about organizational practicalities. Most initiatives already had natural homes in the team, and the goal and motivation were clearly shared.
What comes next
For now, the plan is deliberately simple: take a real break, spend time with my family, read some of the book backlog I’ve accumulated over the years, tinker with hobby projects, and let the next chapter come into focus without rushing it. Five years is a significant amount of time, and it deserves proper decompression and reflection.
I am deeply grateful for the people I have worked with at Canonical, and especially everyone in and around Observability, Charm Engineering, IS, Support, customer-facing engineering, and the product teams. Thank you for the trust, the sharp conversations, the difficult problems, and the many moments that made the work worth doing. I’ve not only met excellent professionals, but people I cherish and hope to keep as friends for a long time.