What engineering leaders can learn from Site Reliability Engineering? At first glance, SRE feels like a deeply technical concern: uptime dashboards, infrastructure capacity, on-call rotations. But core SRE concepts are deeper than they seem. Definitions of service criticality, Service-Level Indicators, Service-Level Objectives, and error budgets are not just technical speak. These ideas can be applied far beyond production environments. This talk explores how core SRE concepts can become high-leverage leadership tools for shaping team culture, guiding prioritization, and driving meaningful business outcomes.
Maxim Schepelin is a solution architect at Booking.com and coauthor of Engineering Manager's Compass, a practical guide to the everyday realities of engineering leadership. Over fifteen years, he's built products used by millions of people every day—and picked up a thing or two about exiting both Vim and Emacs along the way.
