Readiness & Ownership

What a service owes before it carries traffic — an owner, a runbook that encodes understanding, dashboards, alerts, a rollback plan and a tested recovery path.

Production Readiness Review

The conversation before a service carries real traffic: who owns it, how you will know it is broken, and how you get back.

Q · What does a service owe before it is allowed to carry production traffic, and who decides it is ready?

The Ownership Record

Making the owner of a service retrievable at 3am by a stranger — the record, what it contains, how it decays, and how transfers actually work.

Q · Given that a service needs a named owner, where does that answer live so that someone who has never seen the service can find it under pressure?

Runbooks

A document written for someone tired, under pressure, who did not build this: symptom, possible causes, checks, mitigation, escalation, and how to verify recovery.

Q · What does an operator actually need in front of them at 3am, and how is that different from documentation?

Runbook Anti-Patterns

"Restart the service" is ritual. "Restart only after checking X, because Y indicates Z" is understanding — and the difference decides what happens when reality does not match the entry.

Q · Why is a runbook of unconditional commands worse than no runbook at all?

The Readiness Scorecard

Status per dimension with evidence — READY, PARTIAL, MISSING, UNKNOWN — and deliberately never a number, because a number invites optimising the number.

Q · How do you summarise a service's operational readiness without producing a figure that people will then manage?