Discontinue the R&S Standup

Why is this change being made?

The Reliability and Security Standup is a sync discussion scheduled at 3:00 pm UTC / 8:00 am PT every weekday. The intended result of this synchronous discussion was to ensure that coordination of multiple reliability and security efforts related to incidents were owned and moving forward. At some periods of time in 2021 and earlier 2022 this meeting was providing oversight to ten or more efforts. However, since April 2022 the impact of this meeting has decreased as underlying practices such as engineering allocation, FCLs, and incident management overall have gained maturity. This meeting served a purpose to improve reliability, successfully influenced that, and now is no longer needed.

An additional factor in discontinuing this meeting is to recognize some of the negative impacts:

• Due to the timing, much of Engineering leadership has had low participation in more than a year of Group Conversations and AMAs, losing wider context about our business.
• While the daily cadence of this meeting was essential at times, for many months now it has only contributed to anxiety for little value in return.
• Team Members with owned items have frequently participated in the meeting during company holidays and/or personal time off, eroding our intent to ensure team members can appropriately disconnect from work.
• Erosion of our async-first approach to coordination and discussion.

What will take the place of the standup?

It is intended that incident follow-up coordination will occur through the incident management process. At times this may require one or more similar synchronous coordination meetings, but these will be in direct relation to severity and need.

For general oversight, the following mechanisms will ensure we don't lose traction on ongoing reliability:

• weekly Incident Review sessions (currently held twice on Tuesdays)
• weekly review session with Engineering leadership - currently this is the "Engineering Allocation" meeting on Tuesday. This meeting will also have iterations in the near term, but a weekly review of high-severity incidents will remain a component of this meeting.
• Infrastructure Group Conversation and Key Review
• Security Group Conversation and Key Review
• Performance Indicators across Engineering, including Corrective Actions (Infra), Vulnerabilities (Development)

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