If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, It Doesn’t Matter How Fast You Get There

The best-performing organizations have the highest quality, throughput, and reliability while also delivering value. They are able to achieve this by focusing on a few key measurement principles, which Nicole and Jez will outline in this talk. These include knowing your outcome measuring it, capturing metrics in tension, and collecting complementary measures… along with a few others. Nicole and Jez explain the importance of knowing how (and what) to measure—ensuring you catch successes and failures when they first show up, not just when they’re epic, so you can course correct rapidly. Measuring progress lets you focus on what’s important and helps you communicate this progress to peers, leaders, and stakeholders, and arms you for important conversations around targets such as SLOs. Great outcomes don’t realize themselves, after all, and having the right metrics gives us the data we need to be great SREs and move performance in the right direction.