We’ve long believed that incidents (and technical team cultures) improve when more people are empowered to declare, follow, and contribute to their resolution. But not everyone in an organization needs to be able to manage the processes, rules, and settings a company enforces for their incident programs.

Ensuring the privacy and security of sensitive information is crucial no matter your company's size or industry. So when an incident comes up that includes sensitive information — Personal Identifiable Information (PII), financial data, accidental data breaches, or legal matters requiring privileged communication — your response process might need a higher level of security and discretion.

Managing incidents is already tricky enough, and you want to get to mitigation as quickly as possible. But sometimes it feels like organizing everything surrounding an incident is more difficult than solving the actual technical problem and you end up getting delayed or sidetracked during mitigation efforts. We call that scenario the “people problem” of incident management.

We’ve all been there. You’re working through some rather frustrating blockers during an incident only to discover that you don’t own the dependency at fault. Or, you’ve been pounding away at an issue when a fellow engineer reaches out and asks if your service is affected by some particularly gnarly database failure they’re seeing. But then what? Do you merge efforts and work in parallel or head for a coffee break while the issue gets attacked upstream?

The first moments of incident response can be among the most crucial, which in turn can also make them among the most stressful. There are many ways to ensure incidents are kicked off smoothly, but a recent focus of ours was to ensure they could be kicked off quickly. After all, the faster you're able to start mitigating your incident, the more successful you'll be!