Ask HN: Explain the Need for SRE/Platform-Teams to Business / Non-Tech Managers
Those teams are adding value to the company and to the teams, but their work is not _direct_ visible in the product. Regularly, if everything went well (eg no incidents and so on), you don't "see" those teams. Those teams are most of the time visible, once something went wrong. Otherwise, they do "work behind the scenes".
For tech related people/managers, the need for such teams is clear. They are specialized into a certain type of work and their goal is to support product development teams in shipping a better product.
But for managers in the business area with really less or no tech understanding, how do you argue or clarify the need for those teams? And even worse: How do you do this is people don't want to accept that there is a certain type of specialization? When they believe that every engineer (eg Java developer) is capable of doing this "on the side"? And how do you this in your organization? Maybe interesting to know what kind of organization you are in (tech company, product company, business company, finance company, ...)
Of course, everyone can write down what those teams doing. But how to clarify the need for what they do? Because often no incidents happen because such teams do proper risk management and act early instead of waiting for an outage. Once the outage is there, the need for the teams is visible. Arguments like "But we don't have so many outages. When he has one, we stop feature development and the engineers can take over".
Does this make sense to you? Is my question clear? I will be around to clarify more if needed. Thanks in advance!