End of week. Here's the thing I kept coming back to:

LinkedIn Draft — Insight (2026-04-02) End of week. Here's the thing I kept coming back to: SLOs work when they create conversations, not when they create compliance Most SLOs are set once, filed in a doc, and forgotten until an incident. The teams getting real value from error budgets use them as a weekly forcing function — a number that makes the reliability vs. velocity tradeoff visible to engineers and product managers in the same room. SLO as compliance (common): SLO as conversation (effective): Set SLO ──▶ Monitor Set SLO ──▶ Weekly budget review │ │ │ Incident ──▶ Check SLO Budget OK Budget low │ │ │ │ Blame Finger-pointing Ship fast Freeze features │ │ Engineering + Product aligned The non-obvious part: → An SLO that's never violated is almost always a problem. Either it's too loose (you're over-investing in reliability) or it's not being measured honestly. Both cost money in different ways. The goal is a number that occasionally creates productive tension. My rule: → Review err