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Production Incident

This playbook defines how Forward Deployment teams respond to production incidents.

Severity Meaning Example
SEV1 Major production outage or data risk. Client workflow unusable, data corruption risk, auth outage.
SEV2 Significant degradation with workaround. Core workflow slow or partially broken.
SEV3 Limited impact or non-critical issue. Isolated bug, minor integration failure.
Role Responsibility
Incident Commander Coordinates response and decisions. Usually Project Technical DRI or available senior FDE.
Technical Responder Investigates and fixes the issue.
Communications Owner Handles client-facing updates. Usually Deployment Strategist.
Timeline Owner Records timestamps, actions, and decisions. Can be the Incident Commander on small incidents.

On small teams, one person can hold multiple roles, but the Incident Commander and Communications Owner should be explicit.

  1. Declare incident and severity.
  2. Assign roles.
  3. Create or update the Notion Incident Log entry.
  4. Confirm client impact.
  5. Stabilize the system.
  6. Communicate status internally.
  7. Communicate to client if client impact exists.
  8. Resolve or mitigate.
  9. Confirm recovery.
  10. Create follow-up tasks.

Record:

  • Detection time.
  • Impact start time, if known.
  • First response time.
  • Key investigation findings.
  • Mitigation time.
  • Recovery time.
  • Client updates sent.
  • Follow-up owners.

Internal updates should include:

  • Current impact.
  • Current hypothesis.
  • Owner.
  • Next update time.

Client updates should be factual and concise:

  • What is affected.
  • What Calibrax is doing.
  • Whether there is a workaround.
  • When the next update will be sent.

Do not speculate in client updates.