Robot Ops SLA Design for Startups: A Practical Template

SLAs should represent business impact, not technical convenience. Define critical, standard, and background tiers with clear examples.

Teams execute faster when everyone can classify incoming work using the same tier model.

Track acknowledgement time and completion time separately so teams can diagnose where delays are introduced.

Bundled metrics hide whether your bottleneck is triage, execution, or handoff.

An SLA without routing logic is just documentation. Every tier needs deterministic rules for queue priority, owner assignment, and escalation.

This is how SLA definitions become operational behavior in mission control.

SLA misses should be grouped by cause: capacity, policy conflict, dependency delay, or tool outage.

Cause-level analysis helps teams fix systems instead of reacting to symptoms.