Manage a Crisis Without Freaking Out

Overview
This article offers practical guidance for technical leaders on how to manage a crisis without losing composure. It outlines steps to assess the situation, communicate effectively, and restore stability for engineering teams.

Key Takeaways

• Quickly assess the impact and prioritize immediate actions.
• Communicate transparently with the team and stakeholders.
• Establish a clear recovery plan and assign responsibilities.
• Maintain a calm demeanor to inspire confidence.
• Review the incident afterwards to improve future responses.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering managers facing unexpected outages.
• Technical leads responsible for team morale during crises.
• CTOs and senior leaders seeking structured crisis response.
• Product owners needing to coordinate cross-functional effort.

Frameworks and Methodologies

• Incident Command System (ICS).
• Post-mortem analysis.
• Agile retrospective techniques.