Query Consolidation

I led the consolidation of querying across New Relic, simplifying how people wrote and ran queries against their observability data.

Context

New Relic gathers a huge range of telemetry: logs, metrics, traces, and more. Over time, the ways to query it had grown up separately alongside each new product area, so the same underlying question could be asked several different, inconsistent ways depending on which part of the product you happened to be in.

My role

Lead Product Designer, owning the querying experience end to end: product strategy, interaction design, and prototyping, partnering with Engineering to bring the different query surfaces into one coherent model.

The problem

Consolidation projects fail quietly if you don't first understand why the surfaces diverged in the first place. Each one had grown to fit a real, specific need. The work wasn't to flatten those differences by force. It was to find the shared model underneath them and build an experience expressive enough to keep serving every one of those needs from a single place.

Draft gap (Laura): the specific query surfaces you consolidated, and what teams or users were actually doing before. Concrete before-and-after is the strongest material here.

Approach

I started by mapping how people were actually querying today, not how the product assumed they were. From there the work was about designing a single querying model expressive enough to replace the fragmented ones without losing what made each of them useful in its original context.

Draft gap (Laura): two or three of the real design decisions, and what you rejected. The rejected options are what make a case study read as thinking rather than a portfolio of screens.

What shipped

Draft gap (Laura): what's live today, and what changed for users and for the platform as a result. If you have any usage or adoption signal you're permitted to share, this is where it lands.