How do we avoid weaponizing SLOs against teams?

Use SLOs as guardrails, not bludgeons. Pair error-budget policies with support: capacity earmarked for fixes, staff sponsorship, and time to improve observability. Never tie SLO breaches directly to punitive measures; focus on system learning and risk reduction.

We don’t have SREs. Can product engineers own this?

Yes. Plenty of orgs run “SRE-as-a-verb.” Start by giving product teams SLO ownership, a reliability champion per team, and platform support for canary, dashboards, and runbooks. Reward the champion work in the ladder or rotate the role quarterly.

Our stack is Datadog/New Relic, not Prometheus. Does this still work?

Absolutely. The principles are tool-agnostic. Replace PromQL with Datadog Monitor queries or NRQL. You still need SLOs, alert/runbook linkage, and rituals. What matters is consistent measurement and visibility.

How do we measure toil without micromanaging time?

Tag work, not minutes. Use a Jira custom field like `reliability=true` and `incidentAction=toil`. Report on issue counts and outcomes (e.g., reduced pages, faster MTTR), not personal timesheets.

What if PMs push back on allocating time?

Bring data to the roadmap. Show error-budget burn, change failure rate, and the historical cost of incidents (lost hours, refunds, churn). Frame reliability as enabling faster, safer delivery. Also, set an explicit policy: if burn > threshold, capacity shifts automatically.

Culture · Oct 4, 2025 · 9 minute read

The Career Ladder That Cut MTTR in Half: Promotions That Reward Reliability Work

If your promo packets only celebrate features shipped, you’re paying engineers to create future outages. Here’s the ladder, rituals, and metrics that make reliability count.

Riley Harper

Partner & Principal Engineer, GitPlumbers

20 years shipping and rescuing systems at scale—ex-AWS, ex-Etsy SRE, helped three enterprises transition from heroics to SLOs. At GitPlumbers, Riley leads reliability transformations that let teams ship safely without burning out.

Promote the people who make the pager boring.

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The Career Ladder That Cut MTTR in Half: Promotions That Reward Reliability Work

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist