Squish Level Objectives: How SRE can Help Align Technical Work to User Benefit

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Argues that reliability is a customer-facing feature and that SLOs and Error Budgets are the concrete tools to align engineering work to user benefit, urging teams to spend budgets to test assumptions (for example deliberately doubling latency to see if users notice). Recommends UXR, dogfooding and empathy sessions, personas, JTBD and customer-oriented milestones to keep engineers grounded in real user goals, and says tech debt or internal happiness only justify work when they measurably improve customer outcomes.

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" chapters (17)

1. 0:00Intro
2. 0:19Some Engineering Myths...
3. 1:02I don't work on a product.
4. 2:45SRE Principle #1 Reliability is the most important feature of any service product .
5. 3:02I don't work on features.
6. 4:00Your customer hates your code.
7. 4:24We don't determine the reliability of our systems; our users do.
8. 4:50We don't determine the quality of our product; our customers do.
9. 6:30Engineers like to solve problems
10. 6:45Engineers need to understand customer problems
11. 9:14Okay, but what about all the things the customer doesn't care about?
12. 9:37Tech Debt?
13. 10:07Your Happiness
14. 10:23Keep the customer around during development
15. 13:01The best technology is the one that produces the best outcomes for its customers.
16. 13:28Define the product according to what your customer values
17. 13:48First steps: 1. Find your customer. 2. Learn what they value. 3. Write it down. 4. Deliver it.