How to Measure your Most Expensive Milliseconds

In the fast-paced world of mobile development, reliability rarely fails with a loud crash; instead, it degrades quietly through micro-regressions that erode user trust and engagement. While most companies track backend health and API latency, they often fly blind regarding the actual screen-level responsiveness that defines the true user experience.

When Expedia Group underwent a major technical evolution, the team realized they lacked a consistent baseline to compare performance across platforms, leaving them unable to validate improvements before rollout.

In this session, Divya Gupta Arora (Sr. Engineering Manager) will share how her team extended observability from the backend to the screen level; building platform-specific baselines that protect releases before they scale. She will discuss the technical instrumentation of "interactivity", how Datadog helped, and the cultural shift required to turn performance observability into a core engineering discipline.. By the end of this talk, you will be able to scale systems and people responsibly—using metrics to sharpen direction, protect releases early, and grow engineers without losing delivery pace.