Incident Management for Small Teams

Big companies have incident commanders, runbooks and war rooms. If you're a team of three, that's overkill — but "panic and hope" isn't a strategy either. Here's a lightweight incident process that scales down.

1. Detect fast

You can't respond to what you don't know about. Monitoring with trustworthy alerts turns "a customer emailed us" into "we knew in 60 seconds."

2. Acknowledge and communicate

When an incident fires, one person acknowledges it. If customers are affected, a short status update — even "we're investigating" — buys enormous goodwill.

3. Diagnose with a clear head

• What changed recently? Most incidents follow a deploy or config change.
• What does the monitor say — a 500, a timeout, an SSL error? The cause narrows the search.
• Is it one service or everything?

4. Resolve, then record

Fix the immediate problem first. Then capture what happened: when it started, how long it lasted, the cause, and the fix.