How Engineers Can Translate SLOs Into Business Terms Product Managers Grasp
A framework proposed by Dr. Samson Tanimawo argues that Service Level Objectives (SLOs) fail not because of their technical content but because they are poorly communicated to non-engineering stakeholders. The approach recommends converting technical metrics into plain business language, such as expressing 99.95% availability as '22 minutes of downtime per month' rather than a percentage figure. SLOs are also suggested to be defined around user journeys — like checkout success or login reliability — rather than individual services, with both engineering and product owners assigned to each. A shared monthly review meeting and a three-view dashboard (executive, product, and engineering) are proposed to align all teams on the same reliability data. The framework explicitly maps reliability targets to staffing costs and feature velocity trade-offs, enabling product teams to make informed decisions about acceptable risk levels.
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