Not every SRE engagement ends in a full takeover — and **disengaging is framed as a success, not a failure.** Two cases: - **The service doesn't warrant full SRE management.** This can be determined post-launch, or SRE may engage but never officially take over. This is a *positive* outcome: the service has been engineered to be reliable and low-maintenance, so it can safely **remain with the development team**. SRE's involvement made it good enough to not need SRE. - **The service fails to reach projected scale.** If SRE engaged early with a service that never grows into its projected usage, the spent effort is simply **part of the business risk** of new projects — a small cost relative to the projects that *do* hit scale. The SRE team is reassigned, and the lessons feed back into the engagement process. The underlying stance: SRE engagement is a portfolio bet, not a permanent marriage. Some bets pay off with a high-value service worth long-term management; some pay off by making a service self-sufficient; some don't pan out. Treating graceful exit as a valid — even desirable — outcome keeps SRE from clinging to engagements that no longer earn their cost.