The Incident Commander's Handbook: Running the Incident, Writing the Postmortem, and Building a Culture That Doesn't Repeat Outages

Your phone buzzes. The dashboard is red. Someone just typed "is this the outage from last month again?" in the incident channel, and forty more people are about to join it. Being a strong engineer does not make you a competent incident commander - it can actively work against you. The instinct that makes you good at debugging (dive in, go deep, fix it yourself) is precisely the instinct that makes incidents last longer and communication break down, because the room now has no one coordinati...