When KPIs Meet Telemetry: Translating Business Metrics into Technical Signals

Business leaders publish KPIs; engineers collect telemetry. All too often those two sets of numbers live in different universes. This episode walks through the practical translation between business metrics (revenue per customer, churn, time-to-fulfill) and the technical signals that reliably support them (latency percentiles, queue depth, event fidelity). I show why naive mappings fail, how to choose the right level of fidelity, and how to design metric contracts that survive ownership changes. Expect concrete trade-offs: sample rates vs. confidence, aggregation windows vs. actionability, and when to accept inferred signals rather than perfect measurement. The goal is not a metrics manifesto but a pragmatic playbook: clear definitions, ownership, observable SLIs for business outcomes, and cheap experiments to validate assumptions. Listeners will get practical steps to reduce rework, improve incident response, and make KPIs into shared operational tools rather than aspirational posters.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.