Stage 2 · Lesson 7 of 8
Mitigate first, then communicate
During an incident, the first goal is to stop the harm, not to understand it. The rule is . Roll back the deploy, turn off the , switch to a backup system (fail over) or turn away some traffic (shed load).
Find the once users are safe. runs alongside, on a fixed rhythm. Say what is affected, what you are doing and when the next update comes, even if the update is "no change".
tolerate an outage far better than silence. Keep one channel for the people fixing it and a separate one for updates.
Common trapa team spending an hour hunting the bug when a one-minute rollback would have restored service, while nobody told customer support what to say.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 2 cheat sheet entries come with the full roadmap. Unlock
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