Product Stability

At Level 1, product stability means learning to see reliability as part of your job. You're focused on writing code that works—but also beginning to understand the systems and practices that help keep it working over time. You begin learning about the guardrails your team relies on: CI pipelines, linters, automated tests, review processes, monitoring, and incident response. You start asking how your changes might introduce risk or create confusion, and you begin to take responsibility for writing clear, maintainable code that fits into a broader system of stability. Good habits here lay the foundation for reliable software. You're not just writing code—you're building on a set of engineering practices designed to earn customer trust.

At Level 2, product stability becomes a proactive part of how you build. You understand the systems and practices that reduce risk—like testing, code review, observability, and deployment practices—and you participate in them deliberately. You start to spot instability before it reaches production, and you improve how your team prevents, detects, and recovers from issues. You no longer just work within the safety rails—you reinforce and expand them.

At Level 3, product stability becomes part of how you lead. You proactively shape how your team prevents, detects, and responds to issues. You contribute to architectural decisions with an eye toward resilience. You recognize patterns of fragility across the codebase, and you help your team invest in fixing them—before customers feel the pain. You make reliability a team value, not just a personal practice.

At Level 4, product stability becomes strategic. You guide teams and systems toward greater resilience across time, scale, and complexity. You influence how stability is built into architecture, how incidents are learned from, and how operational excellence is prioritized. You align reliability with customer trust and business goals—not just system uptime. You make stability part of how teams think, plan, and grow.

At Level 5, product stability is a defining trait of your leadership. You shape the long-term vision of engineering quality, reliability, and operational maturity across the organization. You guide strategy around uptime, risk management, scalability, and failure recovery—not just in what's built, but in how teams think and operate. You integrate reliability into culture, policy, and structure. You don't just prevent outages—you build a company that prevents them by default.