Operational excellence (OpEx) reviews: the weekly meeting that actually changes behavior
00:00 What separates an operational excellence review that actually works
04:17 Why operational problems become invisible without a structured process
10:24 SLOs, golden signals, and defining what good looks like
14:01 Why automating the report is what makes the process stick
20:03 Mapping your org as a functional tree for the review
24:14 How AI coding tools are introducing new operational risks
Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Shawn Burke, Distinguished Engineer at Cortex, to explore what separates an operational excellence review that drives real engineering behavior from one that produces great conversation and nothing else. Shawn draws on experience from SoFi, Uber, and Microsoft to explain why these reviews so often fail—and how to build a process that actually sticks.
Shawn and Ganesh walk through why senior leadership presence is non-negotiable for the process to matter, and why fully automated reporting is the difference between a meeting that sustains and one that dies. They cover golden signals, SLOs, and how error budgets help teams balance feature work against reliability investment. They also discuss how AI coding assistants are introducing new operational risks around code review quality and flaky tests, and why AI agents may eventually act as a chief of staff—surfacing the why behind the metrics so teams can act on patterns instead of just observing them.
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