Editing Renew (section)

==The error budget idea, applied to CS==

Google's SRE book defines an error budget as the quarterly allowance of acceptable unreliability implied by a service's target: hit a 99.9% uptime target and the budget is the roughly 8.77 hours a year you're allowed to spend on downtime before the team stops shipping features and pivots to fixing reliability instead. It's an explicit, pre-agreed trade-off, not an after-the-fact excuse.

The CS equivalent: how much acceptable churn/contraction risk exists in the base before the team throttles new-logo [[Onboard|onboarding]] intake or [[Grow|expansion]] pushes and redirects capacity to shoring up existing accounts. Most CS orgs never make this trade-off explicit — they just let at-risk accounts pile up quietly while chasing this quarter's expansion number. Naming the budget, the same concrete way Google names it in hours and percentages, forces the conversation before it becomes a crisis.