Failureship and Escalations

Overview
The article explores the concept of "failureship" and how organizations handle escalations when things go wrong. It highlights common pitfalls in incident response and offers practical guidance for technical leaders to improve accountability and communication during failures.

Key Takeaways

• Define clear ownership and responsibility for failure resolution ("failureship").
• Establish transparent escalation paths to ensure timely involvement of senior leaders.
• Use post-mortems as learning opportunities rather than blame-shifting exercises.
• Implement simple processes that scale with team size and complexity.
• Foster a culture where raising issues early is encouraged.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering managers and directors responsible for incident response.
• Technical leaders who oversee high-availability systems.
• Risk and compliance professionals.
• DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams.
• Anyone looking to build a constructive failure culture.

Frameworks and Methodologies

• Incident Management Process
• Post-mortem Review Framework
• RACI matrix for escalation responsibilities