Manifesto

Team Reliability Engineering (TRE): The Field Manual

The "Useful Misnomer"

In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we focus on the health of the system. In Team Reliability Engineering (TRE), we recognize that the most critical "infrastructure" in any organization is the human team. While we use the language of engineering to communicate, we explicitly reject the notion that people are machines. We are here to nurture ecosystems, not just build features.

1. The Legacy System: Dehumanization

We acknowledge the "Enemy": a century-old "Management Science" (Taylorism) that treats workers as interchangeable factors of production. This legacy mindset leads to "technical debt" in our culture, resulting in burnout, high toil, and teams that survive only through manager-led heroics. We choose a different path.

2. The TRE Protocol: Our Principles

I. Debug the Environment, Not the Person

When a team misses a milestone or a service goes down, we do not hunt for a person to blame. We perform Blameless Post-mortems to identify how our processes and architecture failed us. If the "system" isn't safe for a teammate to admit a mistake, the system is broken.

II. Optimize for Effectiveness, Not Just Efficiency

Efficiency is a machine metric; it measures how much output we get for a minimum input. Effectiveness is a human metric; it measures if we are doing the right work to move the organization toward its objective. We prioritize the "North Star" over the ticket count.

III. Adopt the "Safe Enough to Try" Mindset

We do not wait for perfect conditions to innovate. We empower teammates to propose Micro-experiments that are "safe enough to try." By lowering the cost of failure, we increase the velocity of learning.

IV. Eliminate the Manager as a Single Point of Failure (SPOF)

A reliable team does not depend on a single "Hero Manager." We architect for Role Redundancy and shared ownership. A manager’s success is measured by the team’s ability to thrive and self-heal in their absence.

3. The Objective: The Human Outcome

We believe work should be intrinsically rewarding. Our goal is a culture where:

On Monday Morning: Teammates feel a sense of purpose and excitement for the challenges ahead.
On Friday Afternoon: Teammates feel the deep satisfaction of having done something worth doing.

Team Reliability Engineering is the practice of making work better—one human system at a time.

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