SRE was born out of thinking about reliability as a product feature. However, all of the industry focus in the last few years on things like SLOs and Error Budgets and Production Engineering teams, and others, that constitute "doing SRE," sometimes means teams don’t take advantage of a product-centric approach to reliability these days.
And they lose some of the advantages of doing so, as a result. This post covers some project maturity levels, some suggestions for thinking about reliability as an SRE engaged in those kinds of projects, as well as what kinds of collaboration might be most successful in driving reliability-as-product-feature in each phase.