Incident Response Playbook

This battle-tested playbook provides everything you need to handle production incidents effectively, from initial detection through post-incident learning. Based on practices from companies that operate at scale, it turns chaos into coordinated response.

The playbook covers incident classification and severity levels, clear roles (Incident Commander, Scribe, Communications Lead), escalation procedures and on-call rotations, and communication templates for internal and external updates. It includes decision trees for common scenarios, checklists to prevent missing critical steps, and tools for coordination and documentation.

Post-incident processes include conducting blameless postmortems, tracking and following up on action items, sharing learnings across the organization, and measuring incident metrics for improvement. The guide emphasizes psychological safety, learning over blame, and systematic improvement.

With this playbook, teams can reduce mean time to resolution, improve communication during incidents, prevent panic and ad-hoc responses, and build resilience through structured learning. Essential for any team running production services.