How to Improve Your Service by Roasting It
summary
A practical method for surfacing hidden operational debt: run a series of short, interactive deep dives across the service (architecture diagrams, whiteboarding, source control to DR) that total about 10 hours spread over weeks, with each session roughly 45 minutes and led by an impartial roastmaster while a scribe captures outcomes. Conversations focus on how failures are handled, yield a prioritized shared backlog of fixes before outages occur, allow in-room confidentiality, and include an escape hatch to call off toxic meetings.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:28Service roasting
- 4:48Time investment
- 5:47Tone
- 6:22Questions
- 6:54Moderator
- 7:48Roastmaster
- 8:45Overview
- 9:55Topics
- 10:34Meeting after meeting
- 11:11Things to consider
- 12:06Summary
- 12:48Personal Aspects
- 13:10Key Takeaways
- 13:46Is the damage already done
- 14:25When to roast
- 14:48How often to roast
- 15:50Roasting retrospectives
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