Meaningful SLOs: Translating Reliability into Business Contracts

Most organizations treat SLOs as an engineering checkbox or an operations bulletin board. This episode reframes Service Level Objectives as negotiation tools between business and IT: enforceable promises that steer customer experience, investment decisions, and acceptable risk. I walk through how business leaders can express outcomes they care about in terms engineers can measure, and how engineers can translate technical realities into business trade-offs. Expect concrete examples of useful SLOs, the common mistakes that turn them into noise, and a practical governance pattern that keeps SLOs actionable across teams. No vendor fluff, no speculative frameworks—just pragmatic steps to make reliability decisions visible, defensible, and tied to the outcomes executives actually want.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-it-it-business--6867401/support.To continue the conversation, follow Mirko Peters on LinkedIn, where more insights and real-world examples are shared from both business and IT perspectives.