Your network isn't infrastructure anymore. It's a product.

In my last blog, I’ve discussed a common problem: metrics like mean time to resolution (MTTR) mean nothing to business leaders. Celebrating a faster fix for an outage that still cost the company thousands in lost sales is a conversation that goes nowhere. You might as well be speaking a different language.

I argued that network observability is the "Rosetta Stone" needed to translate a technical event, like a firewall issue, into a business impact, like a 45-minute disruption to your logistics application. But a translator is only a tool. Once you have it, a bigger question emerges: What is the new conversation you’re supposed to have?

The answer requires a radical shift in your identity. If observability is your translator, your new role is that of a product manager. It’s time to stop managing infrastructure and start managing the network as your company's most critical product.

From firefighter to product manager

This shift changes everything. A product manager doesn't just respond to outages; they build a roadmap and they obsess over their customer's journey. It’s the difference between being a firefighter, perpetually rushing to the next emergency, and being an architect, deliberately designing a better, more resilient environment.

For years, the network team’s answer to “who’s your customer” was vague: "everyone." But a product designed for everyone is often optimized for no one. When you manage the network as a product, your customers become incredibly clear. They are no longer an abstract concept called "the users." Your customer is the development team trying to ship a new cloud-native application, which needs reliable, low-latency paths between microservices. Your customer is the marketing department deploying a new SaaS platform, a team whose success depends on seamless connectivity to a third-party vendor. Your customer is the finance team, who requires stable access to a data analytics environment from international office locations in order to close the books.

These are your business partners. Your "product" is the collection of services—connectivity, performance, and reliability—that you provide to help them succeed.

Building a roadmap that gets funded

Thinking like a product manager transforms how you plan and justify your work. Your operational plan stops being a list of hardware refreshes and becomes a product roadmap filled with feature enhancements that the business understands.

Imagine your next budget request. Instead of asking for funds to "upgrade the core switch," you present a Q3 initiative: "Deliver a certified, low-latency network path for the new VoIP service to guarantee sales team call quality."

This is not a technical task; it's a product feature. It realigns your team's work from putting out fires to delivering tangible value. It forces you to prioritize, not based on which device is screaming the loudest, but on which business function is most affected. This is how you answer the "What's the ROI?" question before it's even asked. You are no longer talking about infrastructure costs; you're talking about enabling revenue and improving productivity.

The feedback loop that powers your product

A product manager without data on how their product is being used and perceived is flying blind, and doomed to fail. For the network product manager, the crucial feedback loop is comprehensive network observability. This is how you solve the problem of relying on the wrong metrics, like MTTR.

Traditional monitoring tells you if your own equipment is working. Network observability gives you insights into your customer's actual experience. It’s the data that allows you to move from reactive SLAs (contracts about failure) to proactive SLOs (promises about the experience you will deliver).

You cannot confidently promise an SLO for application performance if your visibility stops at your firewall. You must see the entire journey—from the user's device, across every ISP and cloud provider network you don't control, to the application itself. This is your customer feedback. This is the evidence that tells you if your product is truly meeting their needs. This intelligence justifies your roadmap and validates your investments.

This is more than a semantic change. It's a strategic repositioning of your team’s value. When you can walk into any meeting and speak with authority about improving the "customer satisfaction" of the development team or reducing the "time-to-market" for a new digital service, you are no longer just the network manager. You are the owner of the most critical product in the enterprise.

The only question left is, who is managing yours?

Find out how modern network observability provides the end-to-end visibility needed to manage your most critical product. Explore the solutions that power this transition at the following URL: https://networkobservability.broadcom.com/.