Stage 2 · Lesson 6 of 8
Incident command and roles
In a serious incident, one person coordinates and does not debug. This is the . They set the severity, assign and keep a timeline.
They also make decisions when the group gets stuck. The usual roles are an operations lead, who investigates and fixes, and a communications lead, who keeps (the people who need to know) updated. are agreed before any incident.
They decide who gets and how often updates go out. At staff level you are often the person who knows the system best. That is exactly why you should sometimes command instead of debugging: one person doing both does both badly.
Common trapten engineers investigating in parallel, with nobody knowing who decided what.
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Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- BookFreeShape Up
Ryan Singer, Basecamp · Intermediate
Free book on shaping and scoping work so projects actually finish
- BookFreeGoogle Site Reliability Engineering Book
Google · Advanced
The chapters on managing incidents and blameless postmortem culture