Webinar: The Reliability Paper Tiger
You're trying to get a handle on your product's reliability due to rapid growth, so you built and hired an SRE team. They went and built SLOs, dashboards, an incident management process, blameless postmortems- the works.
Despite all of this effort and following the best practices literature- the organization is still in firefighting mode and nowhere closer to a more reliable product than where you started.
The problem? Despite building an SRE team and delegating reliability outcomes to them, they can't influence business decisions- so ๐ป๐ผ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐บ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ป๐ถ๐ป๐ด๐ณ๐๐น๐น๐ ๐ฐ๐ต๐ฎ๐ป๐ด๐ฒ๐.
That's the paper tiger: SRE looks powerful on the org chart, may even have a clear organizational mandate, but ๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ป๐ผ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฎ๐๐๐ต๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐๐ ๐๐ผ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฟ๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐ผ๐๐.
Quick diagnostic- do you have a paper tiger?
โข Will leadership actually delay a launch for production readiness work?
โข Is contribution to reliability part of Product/Engineering performance reviews?
โข Do teams consult SLO performance in sprint planning?
โข Are repeat incidents typically a thing of the past?
If you answered "no" to 2 or more, you likely have one.
I'll break down 6 organizational dysfunctions that create โpaper tigersโ, why they happen, and how to determine which ones are sabotaging your SRE program.