Self-Improving Operations

1. Conduct blameless postmortems — focus on systemic causes, not individual blame 2. Automate toil aggressively — if you do it manually 3 times, automate it 3. Define SLOs before SLAs — internal targets should be stricter than customer commitments 4. Maintain runbooks — keep them current, test them during game days, include verification steps 5. Track error budgets — use them to balance feature velocity and reliability work 6. Rotate on-call fairly — equitable distribution, adequate rest, compensatory time off 7. Rehearse incident response — run tabletop exercises and chaos engineering experiments 8. Log immediately — incident context fades fast after resolution 9. Include timelines — timestamps are critical for postmortems and pattern detection 10. Measure DORA metrics — track deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and MTTR 11. Review before on-call shifts — check .learnings/ for known issues and recent patterns