Every production outage caused by a service that launched without monitoring, without runbooks, without capacity planning, without anyone knowing who owns it at 3 AM – every one of those was preventable. A production readiness review is the gate between “it works on my machine” and “it is ready for real users.” Google formalized this as the PRR process. You do not need Google-scale infrastructure to benefit from it.
Reliability does not improve by accident. Without a structured review cadence, teams operate on vibes – “things feel okay” or “we’ve been having a lot of incidents lately.” Reliability reviews replace gut feelings with data. They surface slow-burning problems before they become outages, hold teams accountable for improvement actions, and create a shared understanding of system health across engineering and leadership.
The weekly review is a 30-minute tactical meeting focused on what happened this week and what needs attention next week. Attendees: on-call engineers, team leads, SRE. Keep it tight.
February 22, 2026
A post-mortem is a structured analysis of an incident conducted after the incident is resolved. Its purpose is to understand what happened, why it happened, and what changes will prevent it from happening again. It is not a blame assignment exercise. It is not a performance review. It is not a formality to check a compliance box.
The output of a good post-mortem is a set of concrete action items that improve the system. Not the humans – the system. If your post-mortem concludes with “engineer X should have been more careful,” you have failed at the process. Humans make mistakes. Systems should be designed so that human mistakes do not cause outages, and when they do, the blast radius is contained.