> If we really want to make products that users are happy with, we need to teach executives how to achieve it, not SREs. SREs shouldn't be driving the bus from

> If we really want to make products that users are happy with, we need to teach executives how to achieve it, not SREs. SREs shouldn't be driving the bus from the back row. They should be rotating the tires and checking the fuel and oil gauges and telling the driver when to stop for gas. To extend on this analogy a bit, the theory is that you might have business OKRs that are driven by SLOs. For example, you might have a wishy washy goal of having happy customers. If you're in the shipping business, one aspect of being happy with the service would be to receive deliveries on time (or earlier!) so you might set an OKR where the objective is "Deliveries are made in a timely manner" where key results might be the number of deliveries made on time and inversely, the number of deliveries that are not returned. By pitting those two metrics (speed and state of the delivery) together, you can ideally capture that an increase in speedy deliveries is not just achieved by people throwing packages out of moving vehicles as one or the other will decline. Of course, simply setting these metrics doesn't mean very much but this is where we can drop down to a lower level and make use of SLOs. An SLO is just some number with a target after all, it doesn't have to be technical by any means. So, how can we help drive our goal of timely deliveries? Well, we might set an OKR that says something like "99% of vehicles should have their oil checked every 3 months". On the face of it, that has nothing at all to do with vehicle deliveries but inspecting historical data might determine that failed deliveries were often correlated with poorly serviced vehicles so by ensuring they're serviced, we can indirectly improve customer happiness by something that seems entirely unrelated. This is all in theory of course and assumes your business is able to communicate across layers and share some sort of overall vision which is very hard! It also assumes someone (in the middle?) is able to bridge the gap to co-locate SLOs with OKRs and what not. Anyway, that's how I understand the "dream state" but have I ever seen it actually accomplished? I can't say I have!