Next Steps for Staff+ Reliability
Explore how to improve system reliability by defining service level objectives, implementing observability, running structured incident responses, and practicing game days. This lesson helps you create dependable systems your team trusts and earns Staff+ recognition for stable outcomes.
We'll cover the following...
If the team panics when you book a vacation, you’ve built a hostage situation, not a system. Reliability is building systems that break gracefully, recover quickly, and maintain customers’ trust. That separates “John the chaos magnet” from you, the calm multiplier.
Here’s what to put into practice:
Define one SLO per critical flow: Turn user promises into contracts with error budgets and burn-rate alerts.
Wire observability: Capture latency, errors, saturation, and traces so fixes take minutes, not hours.
Run structured incidents: Assign roles, mitigate first, communicate clearly, and capture learnings.
Write runbooks: Short, actionable guides anyone can execute at 2 a.m.—not just John.
Schedule game days: Practice outages so the first time isn’t real.
Do these consistently, and reliability stops being luck and starts being design. It becomes a muscle your team can trust—one that gets you Staff+ credit for outcomes, not firefights.
Where to learn more
Dive deeper into chaos engineering in our newsletter post:
Learn the tools you need to design for reliability at scale in our most popular course:
Now let’s move on to “Data Engineering for Product Impact,” where reliability meets leverage.