New Relic

Observability | Devops | Maps

How we turned an incubation concept into New Relic's platform-wide mapping system for understanding dependencies and troubleshooting complex environments.

My role

I managed the product designer directly on Maps, providing design direction, helping shape the research and product approach, and working with the broader team as the concept evolved from an early proof of concept into a scalable platform capability.

My role combined hands-on design leadership with team management - helping frame the problems we needed to solve, participating in customer research and synthesis, guiding key design decisions, and ensuring the experience could scale behind the needs of the original design partner.

My focus
design leadership | product strategy partnership | customer research | systems thinking | design direction | cross-functional collaboration

My Role
Product design manager / Team lead

Designers
Initial desiger - Alan Florsheim
Primary designer- Norissa Clecky

Started
Incubation concept with one enterprise partner

Scaled to
New Relic Platform Capability

Outcome
Default mapping experience across New Relic

Timeline
2022-23

Problem STatement

Problem discovery
Tech stacks and signals are fluid

Large enterprises have enormous, constantly changing technology environments.

Engineers need to understand how services relate, where problems occur, and what has changed. But the information they need is often scattered across different views and tools.

Our initial design partner wanted a way to understand their entire environment at a glance.

The opportunity was to make the system's topology a starting point for investigation—helping engineers move from something is wrong to where should I look?

What users needed to understand

What's wrong?
• See health and critical issues across the estate.

What's connected?
• Understand dependencies between services and entities.

What changed?
• Connect changes and deployments to changes in system behavior.

What am I missing?
• Identify gaps in instrumentation.

Where should I go next?
• Move from the sytem overview into investigation.

DESIGN FOR INVESTIGATION, NOT JUST VISUALIZATION
Time Warp - a slider that moves the map back and forth across time - allows users to see when an issue started, how their environment had changed, and relevant deployments.

Insights
User Research

We conducted exploratory interviews with customers and non-customers.

Overall Health of System
“So I could imagine this on a big screen in the team room....like this kind of war room display, you know, where you can see in a quick glance which systems are healthy and which aren't.”
- NR customer

Onboarding New Team Members
“... for onboarding ...when it comes to onboarding new team members, we have visuals on a confluence page...
And I don't think it's as interactive as this to... get an idea of what's going on.”
- Non-NR Customer

What this told us
The map wasn't just a troubleshooting tool. Customers also saw it as a shared way to understand their architecture, communicate system health, and help new team members get oriented.

This broadened our thinking about the map's role within the platform.

Challenges & Outcome

Challenges
The project underwent extensive iterations to scale it up to handle extreme use cases and vast estates. Incorporating the new design language for entities required remediating design and tech debt, and working across multiple teams.

outcome
In 2023, Maps became the default mapping experience across the New Relic platform.

What began as an incubation project for a single enterprise customer evolved into a platform-wide capability. Getting there required close collaboration across design, product, and engineering, along with a successful transition from the Incubation team to the Platform team.

Missed opportunities
The map only focused on consolidating core APM and network services - it could have been expanded to make it an investigation tool: a contextual entry point into the observability capabilities associated with each entity. 

Today, I'd also explore how an AI agent could use that same topology and telemetry context to help users investigate changes, explain likely causes and guide them towards the next best action.

Open to hearing about new opportunities
Get in touch via LinkedIn

© SARI HARRIS 2026