Comparison
Forcing functionvsYou build it, you run it
Forcing function
nobody wrote runbooks until an on-call rotation made the same people carry the pager.
A constraint arranged so that the desirable behaviour becomes the path of least resistance. Making the team that writes a service operate it, making the build fail on a missing test, making the migration deadline real — each replaces an exhortation with a mechanism. It is a staple of staff-level argument because 'we should all be more careful' has never worked and everyone in the room knows it.
Full entry →You build it, you run it
the team that wrote the code carried the pager for it, and the retry logic got better within a month.
The team that builds a system also operates it. Its power is as a forcing function rather than as an efficiency: feedback from production reaches the people who can change the design, so unloggable failures and unactionable alerts get fixed instead of being endured by somebody else. It is expensive in a way that must be funded — on-call time is real time — and it fails when teams are given the pager without the authority to change what pages them.
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