Academy8 Apr 2025• 12 min read

Incident Management Playbook: Handle Production Outages at Startups

Manage production incidents with clear roles (incident commander, comms lead), severity levels, blameless postmortems, and runbooks for faster resolution.

MB
Max Beech
Head of Content

TL;DR

  • Define 4 severity levels: P0 (total outage), P1 (major degradation), P2 (minor issues), P3 (cosmetic).
  • Incident commander owns coordination; comms lead handles customer updates.
  • Blameless postmortems within 48 hours; focus on systems, not people.

Incident Management Playbook: Handle Production Outages at Startups

Production outages are inevitable -how you respond determines customer trust. This incident management playbook structures chaos with clear roles, severity levels, and postmortem process so teams resolve incidents faster and learn from failures.

Key takeaways

  • Incident commander coordinates response; all communication flows through them.
  • Status updates every 30 min (P0), 2 hours (P1) prevent customer panic.
  • Blameless postmortems identify root cause and action items, not scapegoats.

Related: /blog/async-standup-remote-teams.