Institutional Knowledge & Reliability | Engineer Resilience with SLOs

May 29, 2025

11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET

When a key engineer leaves, they often take more than just their role with them. They take system knowledge, context, and the unspoken rules that keep critical services running. Most teams rely too heavily on memory and informal ownership, and when that disappears, reliability suffers. On top of that, the cost of hiring and onboarding someone new is high, especially when critical knowledge was never documented in the first place.

In this webinar, Alexandra McCoy and Alex Hidalgo will talk about how organizations end up in this position, what actually breaks when institutional knowledge is lost, and how practices like SLOs can help teams make knowledge more visible, transferable, and resilient.

Why losing key engineers creates long-term reliability risks
How SLOs can help capture and communicate system expectations
The true cost of rebuilding knowledge during hiring and onboarding
Practical ways to reduce reliance on tribal knowledge

SLIs and SLOs Demystified

This webinar is inspired by a topic covered in SLIs and SLOs Demystified, the new book by Alexandra McCoy, published by Packt. The book breaks down how to approach reliability with clarity, structure, and a focus on what actually matters to teams and systems. It covers real-world reliability practices, how to build useful SLOs, and the challenges of institutional knowledge, ownership, and alignment that often go ignored. If the conversation in this webinar resonates with you, the book dives deeper into these problems and offers practical ways to approach them. You can find it through Packt.