Reliability
What is Reliability?
The product fails less often than a named alternative: fewer outages, errors, dropped messages, crashes or defects, and customers cited the difference when they chose or stayed.
How Reliability works
Customers build their work around a product only when they can count on it. Each failure costs trust and prompts a search for alternatives, so a rival with visible failures loses customers to the one that keeps working.
The question to ask of a company
What failed less often, compared with which named alternative, in which years, and which customers cited reliability when they chose or left?
Examples
- Khan Academy and other teams left HipChat for Slack after failed message delivery and notifications.
- A 2012 Rdio user reported audio blips every 15 or 20 minutes and switched back to Spotify.
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Google SRE + | Service level objectives and error budgets |
Note. Needs a comparison with a named rival or prior alternative, as for Speed. A published SLA without evidence of fewer failures than the rival is not enough. In the competitor-pair research, every in-period reliability verdict that took a side favored the company that won.