Incident Response for Startups

Incidents aren’t a sign you’re failing—they’re a sign you’re operating real software in production. For startups, the trap is building an incident response (IR) process that’s too heavyweight to use. The goal is repeatability: the same small set of steps every time, so you recover faster and learn more.

This guide gives you a minimal incident response playbook that works with small teams, plus templates you can copy into a doc today.

Keep it small, keep it consistent

Early-stage incident response fails when it’s too heavyweight. The goal is repeatability:

• Identify, contain, recover
• Communicate clearly
• Learn and prevent recurrence

A minimal IR playbook (the version you’ll actually use)

Step 0: Define what an “incident” is

If you only declare incidents during catastrophic events, you miss the learning loop. Declare an incident when:

• A customer-impacting issue lasts longer than X minutes
• Data integrity, security, or billing correctness is at risk
• A system is degraded beyond an agreed threshold

Step 1: Set roles (even if one person holds multiple hats)

• Incident Commander (IC): runs the process, keeps the team focused, makes calls
• Comms lead: updates stakeholders (internal + external)
• Scribe: maintains the timeline and action items
• SMEs: subject-matter experts who execute diagnostics and fixes

For very small teams, IC + scribe can be the same person. What matters is that someone owns the flow and someone owns the record.

Step 2: Use simple severity levels

Define severity by impact, not emotion. Example:

• Sev 0: widespread outage, major data loss risk, active security incident
• Sev 1: significant customer impact, critical function down, prolonged degradation
• Sev 2: limited impact, workaround exists, or quick recovery expected
• Sev 3: minor incident / near-miss that still deserves learning

Step 3: Standardize channels and artifacts

Every incident should have:

• One incident channel (e.g., #inc-YYYYMMDD-brief-title)
• One doc (timeline + decisions + action items)
• One running timeline (start time, detection, mitigation, resolution)

Consistency reduces cognitive load when you’re stressed.

Communication: the difference between chaos and confidence

Internal comms cadence (simple and reliable)

Pick a default update interval based on severity:

• Sev 0: every 15 minutes
• Sev 1: every 30 minutes
• Sev 2: every 60 minutes

External comms: a template you can reuse

Use a short status update pattern:

• What happened (customer-facing wording)
• Current impact (who/what is affected)
• What we’re doing (mitigations in progress)
• Next update (time)

Avoid speculation. If you don’t know, say you’re investigating and when you’ll update.

What to do during the incident (a checklist)

Identify & contain

• Confirm impact and scope
• Stop the bleeding (disable a feature flag, rollback, block traffic, isolate a dependency)
• Reduce blast radius (rate limits, circuit breakers, partial disables)

Recover

• Restore service to an acceptable level
• Validate from a user perspective (not only dashboards)
• Monitor for regression

Close

• Confirm the incident is actually over (symptoms gone, metrics stable)
• Post a final update (internal + external if needed)
• Schedule the postmortem while context is fresh

Runbooks: make “known fixes” fast

Runbooks don’t need to be huge. A good startup runbook is:

• 1–2 pages max
• Written in “do this, then check that”
• Includes rollback steps and safety warnings

Start with the top 3 incident types you’ve already experienced.

Postmortems that lead to real changes (not guilt)

Blameless postmortems are not “no accountability”—they’re systems thinking.

A simple postmortem structure

• Summary: what happened and impact
• Timeline: key events and decisions
• Root causes / contributing factors: technical + process
• What went well / what didn’t
• Action items: specific, owned, and scheduled

Action items that actually work

Good action items:

• Are owned by a person (not “the team”)
• Have a target date
• Reduce future impact (faster detection, smaller blast radius, quicker recovery)

Examples:

• Add a missing alert on error budget burn
• Add a safety check to prevent a risky deploy path
• Improve rollback tooling or add a feature flag

Metrics that show you’re improving

Pick a few metrics and review monthly:

• MTTD (mean time to detect)
• MTTR (mean time to recover)
• Incident count by severity
• Repeat incidents (same root cause category)

The goal is not “zero incidents.” It’s lower severity and faster recovery.

When you should invest in observability (and what “good enough” looks like)

You don’t need the perfect stack, but you do need:

• Clear health signals for customer-critical flows
• Logs that let you answer “what changed?”
• A way to correlate deploys and incidents

If you’re not sure what the biggest gaps are, it often starts with an Infrastructure Audit to identify the highest-leverage reliability and security improvements.