97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 31. How Startups Can Build an SRE Mindset

Tamara Miner

Improbable Games

At startups, SRE is often an afterthought behind shiny new features.

This could be because product or market fit is higher priority, or service level objectives (SLOs) aren’t clearly aligned with customers’ needs. Yet ignoring SRE means missing part of the puzzle. SRE is about being customer-focused—really understanding the experience and pain of using your product in the same ways that your customers will. It can (and should) be a mindset that is present in everyone at your company.

So how can you do this? Implement a way to know and measure what your customers care about—not just features but how those features perform. Having a well-defined set of engineering principles and release gates helps standardize production readiness across the company in terms of product experience—just ensure that your engineering teams go beyond aspirational feelings. Such principles set service-level expectations across the organization for features and products at different stages of development.

Imagine if marketing and sales understood the impact of reliability and were empowered to set product roadmap expectations properly for customers! For example, if you are adding webhooks to your service, the initial release could be as beta. Release gates for beta features might be: support ten thousand customers, SLO metrics ...