The Art of CTO Incident Response Planner creates and maintains incident response runbooks with escalation procedures, communication templates, and role assignments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should an incident response plan include?
A comprehensive incident response plan defines roles (incident commander, communications lead, technical lead), severity classification criteria, escalation paths for each severity level, communication templates (internal status updates, customer notifications, executive briefings), technical runbooks for common failure modes, and a post-incident review process. The plan should be accessible during outages (not hosted on the systems that might be down) and rehearsed quarterly through tabletop exercises or game days.
What is the incident commander role?
The incident commander (IC) is the single point of coordination during an incident. They do not fix the problem themselves — instead, they manage the response by declaring severity, assembling the right responders, maintaining the incident timeline, coordinating communication, making escalation decisions, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Rotate the IC role across senior engineers to build organizational resilience. Train ICs through shadowing, tabletop exercises, and formalized incident management courses like those offered by PagerDuty or Google.