Feedback Loops Beyond Boundaries – When Customers Are in the Loop 

Open Spaces is Gun.io’s field guide to the tools our engineers actually ship with. In this fifth and final installment of our series (Part 4 – DORA Metrics & Golden Signals), Solutions Architect and DevOps veteran Hanno Kolvenbach takes feedback loops beyond the org chart—showing how proactive monitoring can catch customer issues before they even notice, transforming vendor relationships into trusted partnerships.

Feedback Doesn’t Stop at the Org Chart 

Up to now, we’ve talked about feedback loops inside the walls of your startup: devs to PMs, QA to engineers, logs to on-call. But sometimes the most powerful loops are the ones that extend across business boundaries—when your systems proactively surface issues that even your customers haven’t noticed yet.

Here’s a real story from the trenches.

We had a major customer streaming data to us through a separate pipeline. To ensure reliability, we introduced a latency metric: measure the gap between the message’s timestamp and the wall-clock time when we processed it. Normally, this stayed flat—healthy throughput, no worries.

One day, the graph went wild. Latency spiked dramatically. Instead of waiting for a support ticket, our monitoring flagged it instantly. We reached out to the customer:

“Hey, we’re seeing unusual delays in your data pipeline. Are you running a test on your side?”

They were stunned. Not only had they not noticed the issue, they were used to the opposite dynamic: they spot a problem, submit a ticket, and wait hours or days for an answer. For once, we were ahead of the curve.

The root cause? Their QA team in India had accidentally pointed a load test at production—and they didn’t even realize it. Thanks to our feedback loop, we caught it and told them before it impacted their business.

Why This Matters 

That moment shifted how the customer saw us. We weren’t just a vendor running software; we were a partner watching their back in real time. Our proactive alerting built more trust than any slide deck ever could.

The lesson: feedback loops don’t end with your team, your product, or even your infrastructure. They can—and should—span across companies. When your system tells you something’s wrong, and you use that signal to help your customers before they notice, you transform the relationship. You become a collaborator in their success.

And in the long run, those are the loops that turn software providers into trusted partners.