Eliciting and prioritising non-functional requirements, and turning them into testable targets.
3 questions in Architecture & Tech Leadership.
Convert the phrase into an error budget over a stated window, derived from what an outage costs the business rather than from a round number of nines. Each additional nine roughly multiplies cost, because it forces redundancy, cross-region failover and operational maturity that the previous nine did not need.
Rewrite it as a quality-attribute scenario: a named stimulus arriving at a stated rate, hitting a stated system state, with a response measured at a percentile over a defined window. A number with a load figure, a duration and a named sacrifice is designable and testable; a list of maxima is not.
Express both attributes as measurable scenarios, then lay out the intermediate designs so the choice is between numbers rather than adjectives. Where the conflict is genuinely irreducible, escalate to whoever owns both consequences and record what was sacrificed, with a trigger for revisiting.