Muse Operations Academy | operations.institute

The Problem

Sound Familiar?

You have brilliant engineers. Great products. But scaling has brought chaos.

Same Incidents Every Quarter

Runbooks don't exist or don't get used. Knowledge is locked in 1-2 senior people's heads who are one job offer away from leaving.

Weekend War Rooms

Your best engineers spend their nights and weekends firefighting instead of building. Deployments make everyone nervous.

Heroic Firefighting

You're promoted to Director, but 80% of your time is firefighting. Your team depends on heroes, not systems.

Engineer Burnout

Your best people are one bad on-call rotation from updating their LinkedIn. The chaos compounds with every hire.

"These teams are brilliant. They're just missing the operational scaffolding that makes scale possible."

Why Current Solutions Fail

You've Tried the Usual Approaches

Consultants

Drop a framework and leave. Knowledge walks out the door. $200K+ price tag.

Doesn't Scale

Training Courses

5% completion rate. Nothing gets implemented. Gathers digital dust.

Doesn't Stick

DIY Approach

Teams waste 6-12 months reinventing wheels that Google invented 15 years ago.

Wastes Time

Hiring SREs

Takes 6 months, costs $200K+/year, doesn't transfer knowledge to the team.

Doesn't Transfer

The Solution

Operational Excellence as a Monthly Habit

A subscription-based program that installs one proven operational system per month—with proof of adoption.

Adoption Tracking Dashboards

So leaders know it's actually happening—not just another initiative that dies in Confluence.

Peer Cohorts

So teams learn from each other, not in isolation. Accountability through community.

Office Hours

Direct access when implementation gets hard. Never stuck for more than a week.

Templates & Tools

Don't start from scratch. Battle-tested templates from hyperscale companies.

Before

Weekend war rooms
Recurring incidents
Knowledge silos
Brittle releases
Stressed teams

After

Boring deployments
Proactive detection
Shared ownership
Calm execution
Clear ladders

The Process

The Operational Habits Ladder

A 12-month roadmap that builds operational excellence incrementally. Each system compounds on the last.

Q1

Foundation

Month 1

Runbooks That Actually Get Used

Templates, video walkthroughs, 30-day implementation plan, and adoption dashboard.

Month 2

Chaos Engineering

Find problems before customers do. Safe experiments and playbooks.

Month 3

Support Person of the Week

Rotation, scope, escalation paths. Shared ownership that scales.

Q2

Monitoring

Month 4

Health Checks That Matter

Beyond 'isAlive'. Standards, examples, monitoring hooks.

Month 5

Observability Stack

Logs, metrics, traces. Know what's happening before users tell you.

Month 6

SLOs & Error Budgets

Know what actually matters. Make real decisions based on data.

Q3

Architecture

Month 7

Podded Architecture

Scale people and systems together. Zero-downtime maintenance.

Month 8

CI/CD That Doesn't Suck

Smaller, safer, faster. Deployment confidence.

Month 9

Infrastructure as Code

Repeatable, version-controlled, auditable infrastructure.

Q4

Culture

Month 10

Blameless Postmortems

Change behavior, not just document failures. Actionable outcomes.

Month 11

Engineering Ladders

Clear growth paths. Retain your best people.

Month 12

Future Pain Mapping

Anticipate scale challenges. Stay ahead of the chaos curve.

The Results

From Firefighters to Reliable Builders

Real outcomes from teams that installed operational habits.

90% Reduction in After-Hours Incidents

Your team gets their nights and weekends back. Families are grateful.

10x Deployment Frequency

Ship daily instead of monthly. With confidence, not crossed fingers.

50% Fewer Rollbacks

Catch issues before they ship. Deploy forward, not backward.

Minutes Not Hours for MTTR

From hours-long war rooms to quick, calm resolution.

Beyond the Metrics

Calm engineering culture

Higher team retention

Executive confidence restored

Boring deployments (the best kind)

About

Why I Built This

I spent 20+ years building operational systems at Google, AOL, and Mandiant. I've seen what works at hyperscale.

Then I'd talk to friends at smaller companies—brilliant teams, great products—and they were drowning. Not because they weren't smart. Because they didn't have the operational practices that make scale possible.

I got tired of watching talented engineers burn out on problems that were solved decades ago.

So I'm packaging everything I learned at hyperscale companies into a program that actually sticks. Not a course. Not consulting. A systematic, habit-based program that transforms engineering culture one month at a time.

Google/Mandiant Principal Enterprise Architect (2021-2024)

Equifax IaaS Director - 99.999% uptime (2018-2021)

AOL Network Engineer - Zero-downtime at massive scale (1994-1999)

Network Muse CTO - 100+ companies scaled (2003-2018)

BJ Muse Founder, Muse Operations Academy

Not Sure Where to Start?

Take the 5-minute Operational Habits Scorecard and get a personalized assessment of your team's operational maturity—plus specific recommendations for what to fix first.

Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

FAQ

Common Questions

Small, consistent improvements reduce fire drills and create time. Each system is designed to be implemented incrementally—not a massive overhaul. Most teams report that Month 1 alone saves 5+ hours per engineer per week within 30 days.

The principles are universal—they work at startups and at Google. The delivery is right-sized to your context with templates, examples, and office hours support. You implement what fits your stack and team.

The difference is accountability. Tracking dashboards show adoption in real-time. Peer cohorts create positive pressure. Office hours keep you unstuck. This isn't a course—it's a system designed for habits to stick.

Tools without habits don't stick. This program teaches you how to use your existing tools effectively and build the processes around them that make them actually work. We're tool-agnostic and integrate with whatever you already have.

Hiring one SRE costs $200K+/year and doesn't transfer knowledge to your team. This program trains your entire team to think operationally. The knowledge stays with your organization, and everyone levels up—not just one person.

Ready to Make Deployments Boring?

Join the next cohort and start transforming your engineering team's operational culture—one system per month.

Take the Scorecard Schedule a Fit Call

Limited to 8 teams per cohort to ensure quality support.

Stop Fighting Fires. Start Building Systems.