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Engineering5 min read
Reliability is a product feature
Users do not experience your uptime as a percentage. They experience it as trust — earned slowly and lost in a single bad afternoon.
Reliability tends to live in an engineering silo, measured in nines and discussed in postmortems the rest of the company never reads. That framing undersells it. Reliability is one of the most visible features you ship, and the only one users assume is free until it is gone.
Trust compounds like interest and collapses like a bank run.
Make it a first-class conversation
Put reliability on the roadmap next to features, with the same visibility and the same trade-off discussions. An error budget is not just an SRE tool; it is a product decision about how much risk you are willing to spend on speed. Treat it that way and the whole organization starts making better calls.