Teaching Terraform Reviews to Non-infra Stakeholders

Infrastructure pull requests scare product managers because the vocabulary feels opaque. We give students a reviewer checklist translated into business risks: data loss, availability, access expansion, and cost. Each plan comment maps to one of those buckets. Blast-radius tags help. A simple label like "network only" or "data store adjacent" routes the review to the right partner. We avoid asking legal to parse CIDR math unless absolutely necessary. Students practice by recording a two-minute Loom-style narrative over a sanitized plan. The exercise is awkward at first, but it builds empathy for reviewers who join mid-thread. Teams from our Terraform cohort reported shorter review cycles after adopting the format. We also highlight what we do not expect reviewers to validate — secret values, provider internals — so energy focuses on outcomes, not syntax pedantry.