Incident response programs and your startup

Overview
The post explains why growing startups need to move beyond informal on-call rotations and develop a structured incident response program. It describes the challenges of scaling reliability efforts and offers practical steps to build a durable, scalable process.

Key Takeaways

• Start with an on-call rotation even for very small teams.
• Expect response speed to decline as the organization grows and plan a transition to a formal program.
• Building awareness that the transition will initially feel slower is essential.
• A formal incident program should include clear processes, roles, and documentation to support larger engineering groups.

Who Would Benefit

• Engineering leaders managing growing teams.
• Technical founders of early-stage startups.
• Site reliability engineers (SREs) tasked with improving reliability.
• Product managers interested in reliability practices.

Frameworks and Methodologies

• On-call rotation best practices.
• Incident post-mortem and learning loops.
• Structured incident response playbooks.
• Scalability guidelines for reliability programs.