Error Budget Depleted, PM Still Pushing Releases: Three-Tier Gates Turning Reliability into Hard Product Decision Constraints
Overview You’ve probably been here: SLO set at 99.9%, error budget calculated, Grafana dashboard looking sharp. Then Friday afternoon, with the budget 87% consumed, the PM shows up carrying the boss’s mandate: “This feature must ship Monday.” You say no, the budget’s almost gone. PM asks “Then when?” Thirty minutes of arguing later, it ships anyway. Monday night, it blows up. This isn’t an isolated case. I’ve seen too many teams turn error budgets into “ops’ dashboard”—metrics defined, alerts configured, dashboards painted—but the moment a decision needs to be made, the whole thing collapses....