Incident Response IRL

In today’s world, service downtime has a significant impact on any business. Being able to respond quickly and proactively to issues can dramatically reduce the repercussions of any incident, both financial and reputational.

Lessons from incident response are hard-won; they often come out of the most stressful incidents. Experience is the best teacher. We want to make the most of every incident as an opportunity for learning. To best make use of these opportunities, our teams must be prepared and trained in advance.

Incidents can be many things. We recognize our common causes - things that happen often. But it’s our special causes - things that occur rarely - that flex procedures into new shapes and create new paths for intuition.

In this talk we’ll combine theory with the practical advice that comes from years of experience leading teams through difficult incidents. We’ll examine how psychological safety and empathy play into the creation of strong response procedures for technical teams, and we’ll take lessons learned from formalized incident response, such as those used by first responders, and show you how to apply those same practices to your organization.