How to Manage Incidents in Empowered Teams: A Complete Guide for Mid-sized and Large Companies

Clearly, effective incident management is not just a technical necessity but also a business imperative. In this article, we'll explore how mid-sized and large companies practicing the empowered teams and "You Build It, You Run It" philosophy can manage incidents effectively.

What Are Incidents and Why Do They Matter?

An incident is any event disrupting your services, systems, or operations, negatively impacting your customers or internal users. Incidents can range from minor inconveniences like brief slowdowns to severe outages completely halting business processes.

When incidents occur, customers often experience frustration, loss of productivity, and a decrease in trust toward your brand. Internally, customer support teams face increased stress, dealing with irate customers and uncertainty. Properly handling incidents is crucial not only to resolving technical problems but also to maintaining trust, brand reputation, and smooth operations.

"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better."

The Principles: Empowered Teams and "You Build It, You Run It"

Companies embracing the empowered teams model entrust teams with full ownership of their software—from development to deployment, monitoring, and incident management. "You Build It, You Run It," popularized by companies like Netflix and Amazon, means teams don't hand off responsibility after deployment. Instead, they maintain continuous ownership and accountability.

This approach dramatically reduces the time to identify, respond, and resolve incidents because the people who built the software understand it best.

Incident Management Best Practices

1. Clear Communication

Effective communication during incidents builds trust internally and externally:

• Internal: Clearly identify and communicate incident details to all relevant teams. Tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or dedicated incident platforms such as PagerDuty and Opsgenie are invaluable.
• External: Keep customers informed through status pages, emails, or social media updates. Transparency is key to maintaining customer trust.

2. Structured Incident Response Plan

Have a clear, documented incident response process, which includes:

• Identification and immediate notification
• Assessment and escalation
• Resolution strategy
• Communication (internal/external)
• Post-incident review (post-mortem)

3. Incident Roles and Responsibilities

Clearly define roles to avoid confusion:

Leading Incident Calls Effectively

An effective incident call reduces resolution time and ensures clear communication:

Steps to lead an effective incident call:

1. Start clearly: Briefly state the problem, known impact, and urgency.
2. Assign roles immediately: Confirm the IM, scribes, and responders.
3. Keep the call focused: Avoid unnecessary discussions; defer in-depth analysis to post-mortem.
4. Regular check-ins: Ask for clear, brief updates regularly to keep momentum.
5. Calm, assertive leadership: Keep the call calm and organized, maintaining a collaborative, blame-free atmosphere.

"Improvement requires deliberate practice and transparency."

Post-Incident Review (Post-Mortem)

Conduct post-incident reviews to learn and improve:

• Objective analysis: Understand root causes, timeline, and impact.
• Actionable improvements: Clearly document lessons learned and required improvements.
• Follow-up accountability: Assign owners for improvement actions to ensure accountability.

Consider using resources such as Google's SRE Handbook for further insights on creating effective post-mortems.

How Incident Management Builds Trust

Transparent, effective incident management can increase trust even after issues occur. Customers appreciate honesty and swift action. Internally, clear incident handling reduces panic, aligns teams, and improves overall resilience.

Further Reading and Resources

• Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
• The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim et al.
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) by Google

Conclusion

Managing incidents effectively is critical for empowered teams operating under the "You Build It, You Run It" model. Clear roles, structured communication, and swift, collaborative responses not only resolve issues faster but also build enduring trust. Incident management isn't just technical—it's about leadership, teamwork, and communication.

"Incidents happen. What matters is how you handle them."