---
id: "prereq-devops-sre"
type: "prereq"
source_timestamps: ["§ Defining This Pivotal Role", "§ What Makes an Effective Agent Manager"]
tags: ["analogies", "operations"]
related: ["concept-agent-manager", "concept-ai-orchestration"]
reason: "Provides the conceptual framework for understanding how a role bridges strategic intent (development) with autonomous execution (operations) in a durable, non-transient way."
sources: ["agentic"]
sourceVaultSlug: "hbr-seg-agentic"
originDay: 6
articleStem: "hbr-sig-58-agent-managers"
sourceUrl: "https://hbr.org/2026/02/to-thrive-in-the-ai-era-companies-need-agent-managers"
sourceTitle: "To Thrive in the AI Era, Companies Need Agent Managers"
---
# DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

## Prerequisite — DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

**Why you need it:** The authors compare the durability and function of the [[concept-agent-manager]] to **DevOps** and **Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)**. To fully grasp the operational cadence being proposed for AI agents, you need SRE's core principles:
- **Observability** (dashboards, scorecards — cf. [[quote-stauber-routine]]),
- **Incident / failure management** (root-cause analysis on failed cases),
- **Continuous deployment** and iterative improvement (the [[concept-test-deploy-learn-cycles]]),
- **Bridging dev and ops** — the template for bridging corporate intent and autonomous execution.

**Reference:** *Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems* (O'Reilly) — error budgets, post-mortems, and reliability practices map directly onto agent-manager work. The emerging industry parallel is **'Agent Operations'** (analogous to MLOps).