Discovery Questions That Resonate with Site Reliability Engineers in E-commerce
.avif)
Summary:
For Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) in the high-stakes world of e-commerce, success means ensuring systems are always available, performant under pressure, and scalable without surprises. Your discovery questions should surface pain points around incident response, observability, deployment risks, and infrastructure automation while positioning your DevOps tools as the enabler of stable, self-healing, and high-performance systems that drive better customer experience and operational excellence.
Here’s a set of 30 tailored discovery questions to guide high-impact conversations.
1. System Availability and Performance
- What are the biggest causes of downtime or degraded performance in your environment?
- How do you currently monitor system health across peak traffic times (sales, launches, etc.)?
- How confident are you in your current SLOs and ability to consistently meet them?
- Are performance bottlenecks usually caught before or after they impact users?
- If you could fix one recurring reliability issue across services, what would it be?
2. Incident Response and On-Call Management
- How do you manage incident response workflows across your engineering teams?
- What tools are you currently using for alerting, escalation, and post-mortems?
- Are on-call rotations causing burnout or inefficiencies within the team?
- How quickly can you identify the root cause during a high-severity incident?
- What’s your average MTTR and where do you see room for improvement?
3. Observability and Monitoring
- Do you have unified visibility across services, APIs, databases, and external dependencies?
- Are logs, metrics, and traces centralized or are they still siloed across tools?
- How often do false positives or alert noise distract your team from real issues?
- What challenges are you facing in correlating telemetry data across the stack?
- If you could add one observability feature your current tools lack, what would it be?
4. Infrastructure Automation and Scalability
- Are infrastructure provisioning and scaling fully automated or still partially manual?
- How do you manage autoscaling during high-demand events like flash sales or campaigns?
- Are there reliability risks due to infrastructure drift or manual overrides?
- How do you test and validate infrastructure changes before deploying to production?
- Where do you see inefficiencies in your current CI/CD or infrastructure-as-code setup?
5. Deployment Safety and Change Management
- How do you manage safe rollouts, canary releases, or feature flags across environments?
- Are most production issues caused by code changes, config errors, or infrastructure failures?
- How often do you have to roll back deployments due to instability or regressions?
- What’s your current process for change approvals and rollback procedures?
- Are engineers confident in pushing to production without breaking things?
6. Resilience Engineering and Future Planning
- Do you conduct chaos engineering or failure injection to test system resilience?
- What’s your approach to identifying single points of failure or cascading risks?
- How do you align reliability work with product velocity or business objectives?
- As traffic and complexity grow, how are you preparing your systems to handle scale?
- If you could automate or offload one key reliability task this quarter, what would it be?
How Pepsales AI Helps
Pepsales AI equips your team to ask the right questions when selling into technical teams like SREs. It delivers intelligent, site-reliability-focused discovery questions in real time tailored to the performance, observability, and automation challenges specific to e-commerce environments.
What it delivers:
- A deep library of technical and role-based questions by industry and persona
- Smart prompts that adapt to tooling gaps, process maturity, and pain points
- Built-in coaching to help navigate highly technical conversations confidently
- Automated discovery prep so your team focuses on trust-building, not guesswork
Whether you’re helping SREs eliminate toil, improve uptime, or automate reliability at scale, Pepsales AI ensures your conversations are grounded in real need and positioned for real impact.
Ready to Drive High-Value Discovery with SREs?
Earn credibility, uncover critical gaps, and position your DevOps tool where it counts most.
