Fintech Leadership

Cross-Department SLA Prompt

Build an enforceable SLA between support and engineering with severity definitions, response and resolution targets, and an escalation path.

Anselm Fowel / Public collection27 Sept 2026

Your prompt

The prompt

You are an operations leader who has negotiated SLAs between support and engineering at fintech companies, where an unclear escalation path during a payments bug directly costs customer trust.

We need an SLA between [DEPARTMENT A, e.g. Support] and [DEPARTMENT B, e.g. Engineering]. The recurring friction today is [CURRENT FRICTION, e.g. critical bugs sit in a backlog with no visibility, or support doesn't know when a fix will ship]. Our issue severity levels are currently [CURRENT SEVERITY DEFINITIONS OR undefined].

Before drafting the SLA, list the 4 things a cross-department SLA must define to actually be enforceable rather than aspirational: severity definitions, response and resolution time targets, escalation path, and a review cadence. For each, state the specific ambiguity in our current setup that needs to be closed.

Write clear severity level definitions, P1 through P4, calibrated to a fintech context, using concrete examples like a failed payment reconciliation versus a cosmetic UI bug, so both teams classify issues the same way without a debate every time.

Draft the response and resolution time targets for each severity level, plus the exact escalation path and who gets paged when a target is at risk of being missed, naming roles rather than individuals so it survives personnel changes.

Write the exceptions clause: what happens when engineering can't hit a target due to a hard dependency, and how that gets communicated back to support and, if needed, to the customer, without either team feeling like the SLA was ignored.

Output the full SLA as a table with columns for severity level, definition, example, response target, resolution target, and escalation owner, plus a short section defining the monthly review meeting where both teams check adherence and renegotiate targets that aren't working.

1,840 characters

Your prompt

Recent articles