The Reliability Budget Meeting (Monthly)

Once a month, leadership and engineers meet to review reliability budgets and decide priorities. The agenda, the outcomes, and why this beats ad-hoc decisions.

Agenda (45 min)

10 min: review SLO performance month-over-month per service.

15 min: review error budget burn rate. Services in red explain.

10 min: prioritise next month's reliability work based on the burn data.

10 min: backlog grooming. What to defer, what to accelerate.

Outcomes

Each service has a clear reliability priority for the next month. Documented; tracked.

Engineering leadership sees the burn data. Aligned conversation about feature velocity vs reliability.

Engineers see leadership cares. The budget is real, not theoretical.

Avoid

Long meeting that becomes a status update. Strict 45 min.

Inviting everyone. 6-8 people is the right size; larger meetings devolve into status.

Skipping months. The cadence is what makes the data trustworthy.