How do you define and set SLAs with engineers?

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are driven by three factors: (1) industry standard expectations by customers, (2) differentiating your product when marketing, (3) direct correlation with improving KPIs. For checkout, you'll have uptime as an industry standard, but it's insufficient because subsystems of a checkout can malfunction without the checkout process outright failling. You could consider latency or throughput as market differentiators and would need instrumentation on APIs and client resp ...Read More

See question: “What are good OKRs for product management?” for a general introduction to the topic. See question: “How do you approach setting crisp KPIs and targets for Engine features and linking them to your topline metrics?” for my step by step process for realistic OKRs. As part of this process, the fourth phase is about aligning organizations for execution excellence. At this point you should have alignment at senior leadership level on strategic priorities and related investments, plus an ...Read More

This is fundamentally a question about driving technical quality improvements through data-driven decision making. Let me break down the approach... First, let's clarify terminology: What you're looking to establish is an SLO (Service Level Objective), not an SLA. SLOs are internal targets for service quality, which is exactly what we need here. To make the case for a checkout success rate SLO: Ground Your Argument in Data Start with industry benchmarks: A quick Google search tells me that eComm ...Read More

I would recommend first building a relationship with your technical lead/engineering counterpart. Have them show you how your e-commerce platform (or product area) works end to end, from the backend perspective. Make sure that you first understand the end to end flow and specifically the systems design (which is critical in any e-comm platform). Once you understand how the customer's journey equates to the systems design, then start looking into each customer interaction with the site and make s ...Read More