How to Sell Reliability to a Skeptical Exec

Give your leadership what they need to hear, not what you wish they understood.

You’ve done the hard work: set up meaningful SLOs, cleaned up alert fatigue, and built a dashboard that finally reflects what “good enough” looks like.

But when it comes time to present that work to leadership… you get blank stares.

They ask:

• “Isn’t this just uptime?”
• “Why do we need this if nothing’s broken?”
• “Can you just summarize this in one slide?”

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many reliability champions struggle to translate operational clarity into executive relevance.

Here’s how to change that.

1. Don’t start with the tool. Start with the risk.

Execs don’t care (yet) about your burn rate or alerting logic. They care about what’s at risk: customers, revenue, reputation, or compliance.

Instead of:

“We defined 9 new SLOs and tied them to error budgets.”

Say:

“We now have a way to detect service health issues before customers notice and to prove which teams are keeping us on track.”

Make it clear how your work protects the business, not just how it works.

2. Tie reliability to outcomes, not systems.

Execs don’t think in services or endpoints. They think in outcomes. Show how your reliability work connects to what they’re responsible for.

Example:

“Last quarter, we burned 60% of our budget on a single endpoint, but it was the one tied to 40% of user logins. That insight let us prioritize fixes without waiting for complaints.”

It’s not about latency or availability. It’s about impact.

3. Use visuals that make the invisible feel real.

Dashboards full of charts won’t land. But a simple visual showing burn over time, tied to a business metric or team name, can change the conversation.

Use Nobl9’s dashboards to:

• Highlight trends (for example, “X team has hit burn alerts 3 quarters in a row”)
• Show progress (for example, “Our top 5 services now burn 40% less budget during peak hours”)
• Flag risk areas (for example, “This workflow hasn’t met its SLO in 6 weeks”)

4. Give them language they can repeat upstairs.

Executives don’t just need to understand reliability. They need to explain it to someone else. Give them short, clear statements they can use. Speak their language. 

Examples:

• “We’re not just measuring uptime. We’re managing expectations.”
• “These are the signals we watch to stay ahead of customer-impacting incidents.”
• “SLOs let us trade off performance and velocity without guessing.”
• “This isn’t just about risk, it’s about ROI on our reliability investments.”
• “Burning through our budget too quickly costs us stability. Burning too slow means we’re overpaying for it.”

The more repeatable your message is, the more likely it will stick and make a difference. 

5. Position SLOs as a business tool, not just an engineering win.

The end goal isn’t to get approval. It’s to build a shared language across engineering and leadership. We wrote a blog on this topic a long time ago, which is still very relevant.

The best reliability programs aren’t built in isolation. They’re championed by execs who understand that “99.9%” isn't just a number. It’s a contract with the user.

SLOs give you the data. Framing gives you the buy-in.

Final Thought:

You don’t need to convince your execs to love SLOs. You need to show them how reliability drives smarter decisions, protects critical paths, and reduces avoidable fire drills.

If you can do that in one sentence, one slide, or one dashboard, you’ll win the room.