Colette Alexander, HashiCorp, and Sarah Butt, Salesforce
Format: Breakout Group Discussion
This session sets out to explore SRE at the level of the engineering team. Most engineering teams do some form of planning and goal setting—is this process different for SRE teams compared to other engineering teams? Do OKRs even make sense for SREs? How does your SRE team onboard new members?
There are several team practices specific to SRE, including (but not limited to) Production Readiness Reviews, regular production meetings, and wheel of misfortune exercises. What works and what doesn't? Why? What team-level practices are most important?
Colette has been working as an engineering leader in the software industry for 10+ years. Her obsession with learning from incidents and Resilience Engineering began while managing teams at Spotify. It eventually led her to pursue her Masters in Science at Lund University in Human Factors and Systems Safety. As the current Director of SRE and observability at HashiCorp she leads teams involved in improving the reliability of HashiCorp’s cloud product line. She also maintains an active composition and recording career as a rock cellist, and lives with her rescue dog, two kids and husband in Rhode Island.
Sarah is a Principal Engineer within Salesforce's Customer Centric Reliability Engineering group, where she helps lead Salesforce's Centralized Incident Response organization. She is fascinated by scale, complexity, systems thinking, and non-functional requirements— particularly those around reliability. You'll likely find her talking about topics such as resilience engineering, observability, and incident management and response. Prior to working at Salesforce, Sarah worked in both Dell and SentinelOne's SRE organizations. In her free time, Sarah enjoys freelancing as an audio engineer, competing as an equestrian, and spending time with her husband and their three labradors.
author = {Colette Alexander and Sarah Butt},
title = {{SRE} Team Practices},
year = {2025},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}