Becoming SRE

Chapter 11. Organizational Factors for Success

In Chapter 5, we discussed a set of factors that would make it more likely for an individual who wanted to enter SRE to succeed. This is the twin chapter, which explores some of the factors that can help organizations successfully adopt SRE. It would be swell if I could just tell you to collect a group of people who embodied the individual factors detailed in Chapter 5 together and you’d get an instant, fully functional SRE team that works in your organization, but I’m afraid it is a little more complicated than that (though that wouldn’t be a terrible idea either).

Let’s get right into some factors that can impact the success of SRE in your organization.

Contributing Factor 1: What’s the Problem?

This may appear obvious, but organizations skip or elide over the following question far more often than you might expect:

Do you have a problem that SRE could possibly address?

Once upon a time, I received some professional product manager (PM) training, and that has been both a blessing and a curse. It has taught me to ask the question, “What’s the pervasive problem in the marketplace people are willing to spend money on that this product is designed to solve?” which has brought clarity to so many situations (a blessing). It’s also taught me to recognize when the initial answer or answers to that question do not actually constitute a problem and hence require asking again or reframing (a curse). For example, if you ask, “What problem ...