Eric D. Schabell: WTF is SRE 2023 - Telling Effective Tales About Production (accepted)

Thursday, February 9, 2023

WTF is SRE 2023 - Telling Effective Tales About Production (accepted)

Good news this week. I'll be speaking at this new (for me) event called WTF is SRE 2023, to be hosted in London from 3-5 May 2023.

This is the fourth edition and they are putting on four tracks; Observability, Reliability, DevEx and DevSecOps. 

You must be asking the same thing I was when I got this invite to submit, what is WTF is SRE? Well they say, "It is a highly-rated, very-tweeted-about, ridiculously-fun, wildly-insightful two-day conference designed to improve the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)."

As you can tell from the tone and style, these have got to be some really fun people to hang out with for a few days, so I'm all in with the following submissions.

I'll be speaking on a topic near to my heart, helping SREs tell their best stories about production and hopefully expand their toolbox with the ability to convince management to take action on their suggestions for improvements.

Telling Effective Tales About Production

Storytelling is as old as time itself…. Since the beginning of humankind, we share our experiences, we teach, we inspire, we relate to stories as told all around us. How can we learn to use this powerful mechanism to tell effective tales about our production environments when dealing with our management teams? 

Learn how humans listen to stories (tales) more than they pay attention to pages of charts, dashboards, and data. If you want to learn how to make sure your message lands and how to effectively manage upwards in your organization, this is the session for you. Attendees will depart with a small yet powerful set of actionable examples that almost ensure your stories will capture your management's attention. One thing is certain, stories are being told, but what are your production stories and how can you become adept at telling them?

Key takeaways - attendees to this session will be given a small yet powerful set of examples to help them effectively communicate system risks and opportunities upwards to leadership and across engineering domains.. Humans listen to stories (tales) more than they pay attention to pages of charts, dashboards, and data. Learn how to tell your production stories and ensure your message lands with your management.

Looking forward to meeting with this scene and chatting with the attendees over 3 days in London!