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Business SLOs
Why technical SLOs are not enough
Your infrastructure is humming along perfectly. Every metric is green. Response times are excellent. The database is stable. And yet your business is losing money or users. This is the fundamental problem with technical SLOs: they measure whether your system is working, not whether your system delivers what users need.
Consider Uber during rush hour. A rider opens the app. Your backend responds in 150ms. Your database is stable. Your error rate is zero. But the map shows no available drivers close enough to request a ride.
Everything your dashboards celebrate is fine. The only thing that matters to the rider is not.
What a business SLO looks like
A better approach is to define an SLO around the actual outcome riders care about:
99.5% of rider requests have at least 3 available cars within 2 km
This SLO captures what the user actually needs: available transportation options. It doesn’t describe the system. It describes the outcome.
The “3 available cars” and “2 km” radius aren’t arbitrary technical choices, they’re product decisions. The business has decided that riders need at least 3 options within 2 km to feel confident they can get a ride.
