Incident Management For Start-Ups: Best Practices To Get Started

Ship, ship, ship. Faster, better! You’ve heard it: if your first version doesn’t have errors, you’ve released too late. But what are you going to do when your customers run into issues? When your APIs inevitably go down?

A growing startup is a unique place for reliability. You need to focus on finding product-market fit, shipping features, closing deals, and organizing funding rounds. It’s crucial to consolidate your first customers’ trust in your product and your team’s ability to improve it. However, you have very limited capacity to dedicate engineers or budget solely to reliability.

While in the early days it may be easy to get all hands on deck to tackle an incident, you’ll quickly find out it’s not a scalable solution. Incident management at a startup starts as a lean and loose process but with enough structure to let your team develop the skills to get all systems back up quickly and learn how to improve your product and services.

Why Startups Need an Incident Management Strategy

As a startup, it’s tempting to brush off the need for an incident management strategy. There are good arguments for founders to put it off: limited resources, growing teams, and scaling. However, these are precisely the areas where establishing an incident management strategy can improve your execution.

• Distributed upskilling eases growth: Everyone on your team wears several hats—make reliability one of them. But ensure the hat is passed around often. Incident management is a specific skill you need to cultivate throughout your engineering team early on. As your team grows, on-call knowledge will be distributed and can be taught to more people, reducing reliance on a few key individuals.
• Unlock shipping while growing: Incidents at startups require people to stop what they’re doing to fix whatever went wrong. Instead of having everyone go on a wild goose chase when a service goes down, rotating the SRE hat helps minimize disruptions to new feature development and mitigates burnout.
• Build a function based on prior knowledge and needs: Your startup will face increasingly complex incidents as you grow, meaning dedicating resources to reliability is unavoidable. When the time is right to invest in it, you’ll already have experience and insights into what you need and don’t need to formalize a more intentional reliability function.

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How to Build an Incident Response Process for Startups

Mason Jones, Director of Internal Platform at Zapier, has launched reliability programs at several startups. Mason explains that, regarding incidents, “having some lightweight process early on is really critical.” Otherwise, you’ll start running into problems like duplicated efforts, missed checks, and burnout.

Set Up On-Call Paging and Alerts

You probably don’t need full-blown on-call rotations with several layers of redundancy. But distributing the on-call load across your team is important to prevent burnout. The psychological effect of being “always on” will rapidly impact your team. You don’t want to lose founding team members over preventable issues. It’ll hit them faster than you think, so don’t put it off too long.

Modern on-call solutions like Rootly can be set up within minutes. Gone are the days when you needed an engineer to go through a week of PagerDuty training just so someone could get a push notification. Rootly makes it easy to schedule rotations and allows overrides when needed.

As a startup, you may not need to implement a full observability strategy right away. Setting up alerts can be as simple as receiving an email from a customer about something not working, or adding a heartbeat endpoint to your API. Rootly can monitor both cases with just a few clicks. You can implement more sophisticated instrumentation later, and Rootly will manage that scaling complexity with you.

Establish Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Incidents are confusing and stressful. They can paralyze your entire team at times. You need all hands on deck to ensure your customers can access their accounts again or process their orders.

However, after your team grows beyond a couple of engineers, it’s unlikely that bringing everyone together to solve an incident will resolve it faster. You’ll end up with people duplicating tasks in panic or forgetting to handle other essential steps.

Instead of rushing everyone to throw things together during an incident, I recommend having a plan for the tasks that need to be covered, assigned to specific roles. You don’t need a fully developed program, but assigning ownership of areas like communications and customer relations will go a long way.

Use Status Pages to Keep Customers Informed

Offering a status page is the simplest and cheapest way to convey transparency to your customers as a startup. Typically, customers doing business with startups expect occasional glitches in availability. Providing a channel where they can check if there’s an existing issue is helpful because it reassures them that incidents aren’t as frequent as they might think.

Status pages at startups should offer enough technical detail to reassure customers that something is being done to resolve the incident as quickly as possible. A generic “We had a problem, we’ll be back soon” message doesn’t cut it—especially if you’re a B2B startup. Build trust by providing enough detail, but avoid overloading the message with unnecessary information.

Using Rootly, you get on-brand and attractive status pages that you can update from Slack during an incident. Rootly also includes automations, such as restoring the status page to green after resolving an incident.

Incident Management Best Practices for Startups

Learn from Each Incident

Yes, incidents are annoying and can delay deliveries. It’s tempting to resolve them quickly and refocus on feature development. But every incident is an opportunity to improve your team and processes. Make it a point to take time to understand what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.

Follow Up on Action Items After an Incident

Incidents often reveal flaws in your architecture. While you may patch the system to keep it running smoothly, relying on temporary fixes can only go so far. Track action items, like upgrading a package or adding safeguards to an API, to ensure the issue doesn’t recur.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Incident management often involves many manual steps, like creating a Slack channel, organizing communication, or logging tasks in your tracker. Automate these processes so you can focus on problem-solving and learning after an incident.

Incident management tools like Rootly offer out-of-the-box integrations and patterns based on how leading tech teams handle incidents. Rootly lets you stand on the shoulders of giants, helping you start your reliability practice ahead of competitors.

Why Rootly Is the Best Incident Management Tool for Startups

• Easy-to-Use, Powerful Platform: You don’t need to be a senior SRE to set up a robust on-call and incident response strategy. Rootly comes with everything you need and can be set up in minutes. We provide smart defaults that help startups get up and running quickly without tool overhead.
• Beautiful UI and Intuitive Workflows: Rootly is built for modern teams who move quickly and ship often. Our customers have managed over 200k+ incidents, refining our UI to keep it as simple as possible. We offer over 70 no-code integrations to offload a lot of manual work.
• Save up to 50% with the Startup Plan: Rootly offers a startup plan with special rates for on-call and incident management.

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