Radical Visibility

Rick Pollick
1 day ago
5 min read

Updated: 1 minute ago

Radical Visibility: The Secret of High-Performing Teams

We’ve all been there. A product status meeting kicks off and someone asks, “What’s the current state of the release?”

The room goes quiet. PMs scroll through dashboards. Engineers glance at their tickets. Leadership gets impatient. Everyone’s mostly sure — but no one’s confident.

This moment is a symptom of a deeper issue: a lack of radical visibility.

When visibility is treated like an afterthought — a manual status update or an occasional report — it becomes fragile, slow, and reactive. But when visibility is treated as a product in itself, it changes everything. Teams move with speed and confidence. Blockers get surfaced early. Stakeholders stay informed without extra effort.

Radical visibility isn’t just about access to data. It’s about intentional, actionable, and embedded insights that shape how teams work and make decisions.

What Is Radical Visibility?

Radical visibility means designing your reporting and workflows to proactively surface the right information, for the right people, at the right time. It’s:

• Real-time: No more weekly manual exports or stale data.

• Role-aware: Executives need clarity, engineers need context.

• Embedded: Visibility should live where the work happens — not in a dusty Google Drive folder.

• Proactive: Think nudges, reminders, summaries, alerts.

• Contextual: It’s not about showing everything. It’s about showing what matters, filtered by workflow stage, team, or release version.

This approach draws inspiration from design thinking, product management, and behavioral science — combining clear UX principles with automation and modern tooling.

Why Visibility Matters

The costs of low visibility are well-documented. McKinsey found that companies waste up to 30% of their time due to poor communication and misalignment between teams, especially across silos in product and engineering workflows McKinsey, 2021.

Common symptoms include:

• Missed deadlines due to unclear ownership or risk surfacing too late

• Duplicate work from lack of coordination

• Decision paralysis because teams don’t trust the data

• Burnout from context-switching and manual updates

Meanwhile, high-performing teams leverage visibility as an alignment multiplier. According to the State of DevOps report by Google Cloud, teams with clear visibility into delivery metrics and priorities deploy 208 times more frequently and recover from incidents 2,604 times faster than those without it Accelerate: 2019 State of DevOps Report.

The Visibility Maturity Curve

I often describe visibility maturity in four stages:

1. Reactive: Teams rely on ad hoc updates. Metrics are pulled manually when needed.

2. Tactical: Dashboards exist, but aren’t always up to date. Weekly meetings fill in gaps.

3. Strategic: Reports are aligned to business goals (e.g. OKRs), and decisions are made with real data.

4. Radical: Reporting is automated, contextual, and integrated into workflows. Teams trust the system, not just the people.

Example:

At Atlassian, internal engineering teams embed dashboards directly into Confluence pages and Slack channels using the Atlassian Analytics platform, allowing async visibility into sprint progress, incident response, and roadmap updates.

These dashboards are customized by team and role to reduce noise and boost relevance Atlassian Team Playbook.

Visibility as a Product

To move toward radical visibility, treat your visibility systems the same way you treat your core products:

• Define the problem. What are people struggling to understand? Where is the clarity gap?

• Understand the users. PMs want priority clarity; engineers want blockers; execs want forecasts.

• Build iteratively. Start small. Test reporting formats and timing. Get feedback.

• Measure success. Look for improved decision-making speed, reduced rework, and decreased “status check” meetings.

• Document and onboard. Visibility tools should be self-serve. Use onboarding guides, dashboards, and even marketing tactics to drive adoption.

Example:

At Shopify, engineering teams use automated Slack bots to report deployment status and errors directly to feature channels. These bots became so effective at reducing handoffs and missed alerts that Shopify published internal documentation and now open-sources many of their DevOps visibility tools Shopify Engineering Blog.

Real-World Case Study: Release Visibility at SoftWriters

At SoftWriters, we noticed that even with great teams and tools, complex release plans often lacked transparency. PMs weren’t sure which tasks were blocked. QA teams didn’t know which defects were being escalated. Executives wanted clarity without diving into Jira.

Here’s what we did:

• Created automated burndown and scope dashboards, tied to Azure DevOps and Aha!

• Grouped features by product, version, and workflow stage for contextual filtering

• Introduced “defect hot spot” visualizations, highlighting aging bugs and QA risk

• Designed these tools as products — each with its own backlog, adoption KPIs, and rollout plan

• Embedded visibility into our Monday.com workflow, SharePoint pages, and sprint planning reviews

The result? Status meetings got shorter. Communication got sharper. Everyone, from engineers to execs, knew exactly what mattered — and what didn’t.

Workflow Visibility: A Hidden Goldmine

Reporting isn’t the only place where visibility lives. Your workflow is also a product — and often, it’s an invisible one.

Ask yourself:

• Can a stakeholder submit a request and clearly track where it goes?

• Are blockers surfaced automatically, or do people need to escalate manually?

• If your workflow were a product — with UX, adoption metrics, and users — would anyone use it?

Example:

GitLab’s internal handbook is public and acts as both documentation and workflow visibility. Anyone can see how issues move through stages, how requests are prioritized, and how decisions are made — from interns to executives GitLab Handbook. This radical transparency is part of why GitLab’s remote-first teams have scaled rapidly with high trust.

Design for Adoption, Not Just Accuracy

Great visibility systems don’t just work — they get used. That means adoption must be designed intentionally.

• Co-create with users. Engineers and PMs should help define what “useful” looks like.

• Pilot with smaller teams. Launch your dashboard or workflow change with a willing test group.

• Create rituals. Tie reporting to recurring events like standups, sprint reviews, or release councils.

• Use internal marketing. Send emails, offer demos, share “what’s new” updates to drive awareness.

Example:

In 2023, Slack’s internal ops teams launched a new prioritization workflow with a single “intake board” connected to all departments. They marketed it internally with walk-through videos, scheduled lunch-and-learns, and released usage metrics to show adoption progress. This turned a static tool into a living part of their operational rhythm.

Visibility as Culture

Ultimately, radical visibility isn’t just about data — it’s about culture.

• It reduces the need for constant status meetings.

• It encourages async alignment, letting people work with fewer interruptions.

• It builds trust, especially between product, engineering, and leadership.

• It creates a shared sense of purpose and momentum.

When visibility systems are strong, your team doesn’t need to ask “Who owns this?” or “What’s blocked?” They already know. Everyone understands the plan, the risks, and their role in it.

And if something starts to slip? Visibility makes it safe to surface, not hide.

What to Do Next

You don’t need a massive overhaul to start improving visibility. You just need to take the first step with intention:

1. Audit your current systems. Where does visibility break down?

2. Identify one high-friction workflow to improve.

3. Map out who your reporting users are and what they need.

4. Build or revise one visibility tool. Embed it in a workflow.

5. Measure its impact and iterate.

6. Treat visibility like a living product — with goals, users, and updates.

Final Thoughts

Radical visibility isn’t about surveillance or micromanagement. It’s about creating shared clarity and reducing unnecessary noise. It frees up time, sharpens focus, and builds trust.

The best part? Once in place, visibility compounds. Each improvement builds momentum for the next. Your team starts to expect clarity — and contributes to it.

In a fast-moving world, that kind of transparency isn’t optional. It’s a competitive advantage.