Trading Without a Ticker

Imagine a trading floor where analysts must apply for permission to see the market feed. By the time the request is approved, the opportunity has passed. No trade is made, no value captured. Markets demand speed and visibility. So does digital product.

Every player leaves a trail of signals: how quickly a page loaded, whether a transaction completed smoothly, if an interaction failed. Collectively, these signals are our most direct measure of experience. They are also one of our clearest levers for growth.

But real user monitoring (RUM) is not free. As I argued in Watching the Watchers, every beacon and data point consumes bandwidth, processing, and ultimately the player’s time. It is a tax on the very experience we aim to improve. It is also a direct financial cost to the organisation in infrastructure and tooling. If we accept those costs, then failing to use the data fully is wasteful twice over. The player pays, the business pays, and still teams are left in the dark.

In many organisations, access to these signals is treated like access to payroll. Product teams, engineers and designers are asked to raise tickets, justify, and wait. The intent is reasonable: compliance, security, governance. The effect is limiting. Decisions are made without knowing what players actually experience. Issues are spotted late. Opportunities are missed.

When Things Go Wrong
The impact is clearest in moments of stress: a spike in errors, a drop in conversion, a release that misbehaves under load. In those situations, the last thing anyone should be doing is scrabbling for access. Time spent working out who to ask or which form to fill in is time not spent fixing the problem. And inevitably, the burden falls on the same helpful few who end up acting as human routers for everyone else’s requests. That is fragility.

Leadership’s role is clear. Just as a trading floor equips everyone with the same market view, our job is to equip teams with the player’s view. That means building compliance and audit into the system, not into each individual request. Access should be the default. Data should be available out of the box. Governance should protect without slowing the organisation down.

The business case follows directly. When teams cannot see error rates or load times, they optimise blindly. When they can, they close the gap between what we intend to deliver and what players actually feel. That difference shows up in retention, conversion and revenue.

A Growth Lever, Not Housekeeping
The point is the same as in enterprise architecture. A flock does not fly in formation because someone draws it on a whiteboard. It does so because each bird has live awareness of the others. Architecture without live signals becomes theatre. Data governance without accessibility becomes friction. To lead at scale, the organisation needs both: a shared structure and a flow of information that reaches everyone shaping the player experience.

As argued in Keep the Heart Beating and Inner Sourcing, visibility and shared responsibility accelerate the whole system. The same applies here. The more people who can see what players see, the faster we can act on it.

Democratising data is not internal housekeeping. It is a growth lever. Every barrier removed shortens the path from player experience to business outcome. That is what “player first” looks like in practice.