Have you used one before, and did it help or limit your team?
I’m concerned they might encourage a “done” mindset instead of promoting continuous improvement.
We’ve used a maturity model to guide our SRE practices, and it honestly helped more than it hurt but we treated it as a compass, not a finish line. The real value was in aligning cross-functional teams on where we stood with things like incident response, observability, and testing culture.
But yeah, I’ve seen teams fall into the “we’re level 4, so we’re done” trap. For us, it only worked because leadership reinforced that it’s a living model, not a checklist to graduate from.
I’ve used one at a previous company, and while it gave us structure, it also created a false sense of progress. We’d hit “Level 3” and then people stopped pushing for improvements, almost like we’d arrived.
What worked better was when we switched to using maturity indicators as a conversation starter, not a report card.
We started running internal reliability reviews where we graded ourselves honestly, but the emphasis was always on “what’s next?” rather than “are we there yet?”
We implemented a lightweight maturity model focused just on reliability signals like alerting health, on-call experience, and change failure rate. It was helpful early on to spot big gaps and make the case for investment.
But I get your concern: it can totally stall momentum if teams see it as binary. What made the difference for us was pairing the model with quarterly retros, so the maturity score was a checkpoint, not a goal. It gave structure without killing the culture of improvement.