Originally Recorded on February 4, 2024

Everyone wants reliability... but no one agrees on what that means.

Executives want big-picture success metrics. Engineers want clear, achievable goals. Middle managers? They’re caught in the middle, translating priorities up and down while trying to keep the team on track.

The result? Confusion, frustration, and burnout. Engineers are chasing fires without knowing if they actually help the customer. Execs are frustrated that reliability “isn’t improving.” And customers? They just want things to work.

Sound familiar?

We’re not here to tell you that SLOs are the one and only answer to reliability challenges. They’re not. There are plenty of ways to tackle reliability, and no single approach is universally “correct.” But here’s what we’ve learned from tackling complex reliability challenges for over five years: Instead of relying on vague uptime goals or endless debates over priorities, SLOs give entire organizations a shared language to define, measure, and agree on what “good enough” reliability actually means - for the business and the customer.