The systems we build today fundamentally affect nearly every aspect of human life, and the largest count their user bases in the billions. This means the way we used to work, focusing entirely on how our systems might succeed, is no longer enough: like other engineers, we now need to be simultaneously focused on how our systems might fail, and making sure they fail safely.

This is a fundamental change in the way we do our jobs, and it falls on us as leaders to understand this, articulate it, and work it into every aspect of what we do. I’m going to discuss what this looks like for real systems and how engineering and product leaders can drive this change in our profession.