Incident response programs and your startup

Incident response at a tiny startup works because everyone knows the code, but that model collapses once the team grows. The piece warns that moving to a formal program will feel slower at first, but without that shift the company hits a wall where only a few veterans keep the service alive. It stresses building awareness that response quality will dip before it improves, and that the alternative is a reliability cliff.

The author breaks the rollout into four pillars: training every engineer on the response process, building tooling that turns alerts into actionable incidents, defining clear roles like an incident commander, and instituting post-mortem reviews. He notes that early on a single on-call rotation suffices, but by two hundred engineers you need separate rotations and a dedicated tooling team plus a program manager to keep the process product-like and low-friction.

A common failure mode is the rise of "incident law", where teams focus on ticking boxes instead of fixing broken processes. Treating the incident system as a product, measuring usability rather than compliance, and giving the tooling team a reliability mindset prevents that drift. This shift reduces burnout and keeps senior engineers from being the sole fire-fighters.

Beyond the operational side, the article pushes a proactive reliability model. It proposes an investment thesis to balance reliability against feature work, bulk incident analysis to spot systemic issues, building reliable architecture into the system, and establishing quality assertions that keep core properties stable. These practices let leaders prioritize work that yields the biggest reliability impact per engineering hour.

For a technical leader, the takeaway is clear: stop relying on heroic fire-fighting, embed a structured, product-driven incident program early, and evolve it with the organization's scale to keep reliability a strategic asset rather than a compliance burden.