The Tolerance Budget: Agree How Much Customer Pain You Can Spend

Business teams ask to move fast; engineering teams want limits that preserve customers and ops capacity. The Tolerance Budget is a small, copy‑paste artifact that makes that trade‑off explicit: a named budget owner, a clear currency (customer‑minutes degraded, % of users affected, or a dollar cap for remediation), replenishment rules, safe floors and absolute no‑go thresholds, and an automatic post‑spend readout. Mirko opens with a tight vignette where an experiment blew past informal risk, produced ad‑hoc refunds, and shredded trust. He contrasts what product leaders mean by 'acceptable risk' with engineers' operational reality, explains pragmatic defaults for three common currencies, and reads three filled examples aloud. Listeners leave with a short protocol to negotiate a budget for one product stream, a 7‑day pilot script to run and measure (budget spends, emergency rollbacks avoided, ad‑hoc compensation incidents), and clear governance guards so risk is a deliberate decision, not an accident. CTA: pilot a Tolerance Budget this week and leave a review.

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