SRE teams that fight with product teams don't get things done. SRE teams that get along with product teams get surprising amounts of reliability work done by product engineers themselves. Here's how to build that trust.
Start by making them faster, not slower
The common SRE pattern: introduce yourself by adding gates. 'You need to do X before you can deploy.' 'Your service needs Y before production.' Product teams immediately see you as friction.
Better pattern: introduce yourself by removing friction. 'I noticed your CI takes 20 minutes. I can get it to 6. Interested?' Now you're useful. The gates come later, and you have trust to spend.
Speak their language
Product engineers care about: shipping, feature quality, user complaints. They don't care about: error budgets, SLIs, observability stacks.
Translate. Instead of 'we're over our SLO,' say 'users are seeing errors on checkout — here's what's hitting them and what it's costing.' The facts are the same. The reception is totally different.
Share ownership of incidents
When a product team's code breaks prod, resist the urge to fix it yourself. Instead: be in the room, coach them through it, let them own the fix.
Yes, it's slower. Yes, sometimes they'll ask awkward questions. That's exactly the point. They're learning. After 3 incidents, they'll be better engineers and more grateful to your team.
Give credit publicly
When a product team does reliability work well, say so. Publicly. In eng all-hands. On the CEO's Slack thread.
This sounds performative. It's not. It's you saying 'reliability is valued here, and we notice when people invest in it.' Other teams see it and start wanting credit too. You're using recognition as a reliability multiplier.
Absorb the hit sometimes
Sometimes a product team will say 'we don't have time for the runbook right now, can you just do it?' Say yes. Write the runbook. Don't make a thing of it.
Do this too often and you're a service team. Do this never and you're hostile. Do this sometimes, strategically, and you're building long-term trust. Read the room.
The end goal
After a year of this, product teams start coming to you before launches. 'We're about to ship X — any reliability concerns?' That's when you know you've won. They see you as a partner, not a checkpoint.
SRE culture work is slow. It compounds. Invest in it from day one.
Written by Dr. Samson Tanimawo
BSc · MSc · MBA · PhD
Founder & CEO, Nova AI Ops. https://novaaiops.com
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