Sla Definer

sla-definer

Agent: VP Product

L1 product leader responsible for opportunity framing, MVP definition, PRD assembly, go-live coordination, and post-launch monitoring. Owns the product strategy and roadmap from idea through GA.

Department ethos: ideal-product.md

Skill Description

Defines the service-level agreements that the product will commit to for customers.

When to Use

• When a product is approaching GA and enterprise buyers require contractual SLA commitments
• When entering a new market segment (e.g., healthcare, financial services) with regulatory SLA expectations
• When post-incident reviews reveal that existing SLAs are misaligned with actual system capabilities
• When Sales escalations indicate that missing or vague SLA terms are stalling deal closure

Workflow

1. Audit current capabilities: Gather historical data on uptime, p50/p95/p99 latency, incident frequency, MTTR, and support response times from engineering and ops. Deliverable: system performance baseline report.
2. Benchmark against market: Research SLA terms offered by direct competitors and adjacent products in the same buyer segment. Note where the market floor and ceiling sit for each metric. Deliverable: competitive SLA benchmark.
3. Define SLA metrics: Select the specific metrics to include — availability percentage, response-time percentiles, support-tier response windows, RTO/RPO for disaster recovery, and data-processing throughput guarantees. Deliverable: SLA metric definitions.
4. Set target thresholds: Propose numeric targets for each metric that are achievable with current architecture and headroom for growth. Stress-test targets against worst-case scenarios from the incident history. Deliverable: proposed SLA targets with confidence intervals.
5. Design remediation and credit policies: Define what happens when an SLA is breached — service credits, escalation paths, root-cause disclosure timelines, and customer notification protocols. Deliverable: SLA remediation policy.
6. Review with Engineering and Legal: Validate that Engineering can instrument, measure, and alert on every SLA metric. Confirm that Legal approves the contractual language and liability exposure. Deliverable: engineering feasibility sign-off and legal review.
7. Publish the SLA document: Finalize the SLA in both customer-facing and internal versions. The customer-facing version goes into contract templates; the internal version includes monitoring runbooks and escalation procedures. Deliverable: published SLA document (external + internal).

Anti-Patterns

• Aspirational SLAs: Committing to targets the system cannot currently meet, hoping infrastructure improvements will close the gap before a breach. Why: Breached SLAs erode customer trust and trigger financial credits that compound quickly.
• Copy-paste SLAs: Adopting a competitor's SLA verbatim without validating against your own architecture and ops maturity. Why: Your system characteristics differ; borrowed targets may be unachievable or too conservative.
• Metric-free SLAs: Using vague language like "high availability" or "best-effort response" without numeric commitments. Why: Ambiguous SLAs create disputes during incidents and undermine the credibility of the product in enterprise procurement.
• SLAs without monitoring: Publishing SLA targets without instrumented dashboards and alerting to detect breaches proactively. Why: If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it, and customers will discover breaches before you do.

Output

On success: A published SLA document (customer-facing and internal) containing metric definitions, numeric targets, measurement methodology, remediation and credit policies, and monitoring runbook references — approved by Engineering, Legal, and Product. On failure: Report which metrics lack sufficient historical data, what architectural gaps prevent commitment, the best available interim SLA (e.g., best-effort with transparency commitments), and a roadmap to close gaps for a full SLA in a defined timeframe.

Related Skills

• business-model-sketcher — sibling skill under the same agent — combine with business-model-sketcher for end-to-end coverage
• competitive-response-monitor — sibling skill under the same agent — combine with competitive-response-monitor for end-to-end coverage
• goal-framer — sibling skill under the same agent — combine with goal-framer for end-to-end coverage