Digital Reliability

So what does reliability mean for a digital consumer business??

Reliability, in simple terms, is defined by how your architecture stands up to an unexpected event. What is the resilience built into your system to manage events under various real-world circumstances?? Also important to discuss here, is the concept of availability. While systems can be available, are they reliable? A reliable application is one which is capable of serving customers' intent even in the most dire situations. Consumers experiencing a slow service are upset even if the experience is limited to a smaller region or set of features.

Reliability is nurtured when an organization’s thinking or engineering revolves around the customer. As important as algorithms and high-quality code is to engineering, equally or more important is to understand customer intent. Reliability has this delicate mix of engineering practices, user-centricity and human empathy. It needs organizations to invest in a culture that can help understand customer empathy. Google CRE has an interesting formula -> Customer Anxiety = 1 / Reliability

In the context of reliability, do product development teams understand the philosophy of failure, graceful failure, provide the next possible course of action, so that the experience is flawless? Such experiences are enabled by technology, tools, patterns & techniques that are geared towards nurturing this.?

As complex as this may sound, there are but few fundamental techniques that enable development with the customer at the center. As I explore this crucial concept of digital reliability in my posts, I shall over the coming weeks, elaborate on these techniques one-by-one. And this understanding of reliability has not been a solo endeavor, my conversations with product, platform, SRE experts and partner teams who have a keen understanding of engineering, reliability and customer centricity. Special thanks to Manu Bhatia Aiswarya Devarajan who have helped me build this understanding.?

Technique 1 - Default vs Preferred - Every developer when they build an experience have 2 choices - the default and the preferred experience. If there is a failure, one needs to be able to switch to a default experience. For e.g., due to a high latency network, if personalization is impacted, should a default experience kick in seamlessly, another example - can mobile apps have an offline mode? The product, design, development and operations should be empowered to build experiences that can ‘default-to’, if needed.

Engineering more than math, algorithms, and cool tech is also about thinking about the customer and putting yourself in their shoes. While developers pursue their engineering, they are taught algorithms and coding. In reality, engineering is about the customer and the need to solve a human problem. What’s your ‘reliability’ moment as an engineer or customer, please share……