Getting reliability on the product roadmap: How SREs can win prioritisation
Reliability work often loses to feature delivery. But SRE and platform teams can make the business case, speak the product language, and finally get stability on the roadmap.
Suppose you work in SRE, platform, or infrastructure. In that case, you’ve probably felt the frustration: you know a reliability issue is going to bite the business sooner or later, but when you bring it up to the product team, it’s treated as “technical debt”. Something important, but never urgent. The roadmap fills with features, growth initiatives, and compliance deadlines, while the work needed to improve stability quietly slips to “next quarter” over and over.
It’s not that product managers don’t care about reliability. It’s that reliability is often presented in purely technical terms: “improve CPU usage,” “this issue could happen”, “it will be safer to deploy”, or “the correct way of doing this is that”. Try to explain to the business why Kubernetes must be upgraded!
This approach doesn’t translate what those improvements mean for customer experience, revenue, or strategic goals. In the absence of a clear link, feature delivery almost always wins.
Reliability, however, is not just a technical concern. It’s a business capability. When teams make it a shared language between engineering and product, reliability work starts being a visible, measurable investment in protecting and growing value.
The symptoms of reliability being deprioritised
The first step is to recognise when reliability tasks quietly but surely fall off the radar. There are common patterns to spot.
Reliability work is an afterthought. Typically, you would hear “let’s work on reliability in the next sprint”, but it never happens. It doesn’t play in the same category as features, and is prioritised only if there is still some capacity left. Product teams have to show progress to leadership, and it is much more challenging to showcase “reliability” than a new feature.
On the engineering side, we are guilty of documenting reliability as engineering work. We talk about backups, replication lag, or error rates, but we don’t link these issues to user experience, revenue loss, or compliance risks. For example, a platform team may want other engineers to migrate from tool A to tool B because of X technical benefits. But why would you do that from a product perspective? It sounds more like a nice-to-have optimisation rather than a strategic necessity.
Another symptom is linked to incidents. The fixes are narrowly scoped to restore the service, but don’t often address the underlying problem. Typically, a vague post-incident action such as “monitor more closely” could be translated as “we know there is an issue, but we don’t want to deal with it now”. It is a good sign that reliability is not the priority. It is similar to Service Level Objective breaches. They happen, but the product team is not concerned about them. Maybe because the SLO is too technical? In the meantime, reliability debt accumulates quietly while the roadmap keeps rolling.
If you can identify these symptoms, you have a chance to reframe reliability in business terms before it becomes a serious incident. Every team should be accountable for the uptime of their systems, not only SRE.
Misalignment is the root cause
It’s tempting to assume that when reliability isn’t prioritised, it’s because product managers “don’t get it.” I’ve made this assumption many times. In reality, it is a misalignment coming from differences in how product and engineering measure progress, talk about impact, and feel urgency.
Features have clear milestones: mockups, demos, and launch dates. Reliability improvements often don’t have a shiny “before and after” moment, especially if they prevent problems that never happen. From a product perspective, that makes them harder to justify in a roadmap that needs visible wins.
For example, how do you get your product owner to prioritise code refactoring of an existing feature? The customers won’t notice it. The changes will be invisible to everyone except the engineers. And that makes alignment between people more challenging.
The priorities between teams are also different. While your SRE and platform team would love for you to spend some time improving your system's reliability, product teams are under constant pressure to hit quarterly business indicators such as revenue growth or user acquisition. Reliability investments often pay off in the long term with reduced downtime and smoother scaling in the months ahead. But product teams need short-term measurable impact.
Similarly, metrics between teams are also misaligned. SREs and engineers talk about P99 latency, but product teams can’t easily connect those metrics to business outcomes. There is a need to have a bridge and have everyone speaking the same language to ensure fair prioritisation of work.
And sometimes, the product teams’ tolerance of the limited reliability can be higher than engineers. They have learned to live with them, and they don’t see the urgency to make reliability a competitive advantage.
Understanding these dynamics should help tailor the best approach to change that. If you can translate reliability needs into the same language product uses for features (value, risk, and competitive advantage), you dramatically increase your odds of getting them onto the roadmap.
How to finally get reliability on the roadmap
I am sure you’ve already heard of the importance of adapting a speech to the audience in the room. This is the same here.
To get reliability work to compete with features on a product roadmap, you need to pitch it in a way that aligns with how product managers think and how prioritisation decisions are made.
Instead of saying “we need to reduce error rates”, say “checkout failures are costing us $50k/month in lost sales”. Instead of “we need to upgrade to the latest version of a package to reduce latency”, say “conversion rate drops by 10% whenever the load time is above two seconds”. These statements are not abstract. They mean something for the business. They are measurable and related to the product priorities. In the end, it’s all about connecting business SLOs and technical SLIs.
If reliability is framed as “competing” with feature delivery, it will usually lose. Instead, show how reliability work enables the product: faster delivery, fewer incidents, fewer unplanned interruptions, more predictable releases, and happier engineers. But again, be ready to show data. Don’t say releases will be more predictable if releases have never been an issue!
Data is a powerful ally. Do not track just downtime, but also customer complaints, support tickets, lost transactions, or churn. Things that product owners will understand and can support the prioritisation of reliability work. This is applicable for most “engineering work”, not just reliability. For example, if you want to optimise infrastructure costs. Don’t just say that it will be cheaper. Have an estimate of the effort required and how much savings it will create.
Then, set and socialise SLOs with the product team. SLOs and SLIs are not just for engineers. When including the product team to define them, they become a contract and part of the measure of success. Once agreed, it is much harder to make them disappear because they are not as good as expected! And they will encourage everyone to include reliability work as part of the roadmap.
Reliability never wins priority by itself just because it’s essential. It wins when it’s presented as a direct lever for user trust, revenue protection, and faster product delivery.
Conclusion
Reliability is a business asset. For SREs and platform teams, the challenge is translating technical needs into the language of business goals and building shared ownership with the product. That means speaking about user trust, revenue, and long-term delivery speed.
When product and engineering align, reliability stops being a hidden cost and becomes a visible driver of growth. And even if the work doesn’t get prioritised every time, engineers still have the opportunity to incorporate reliability work into the development of new features as part of the scope.
So, before your next sprint planning, ask yourself: What will I change to make my reliability work as compelling as a new feature?