On-call
Make on-call predictable, coachable, and sustainable.
On-call readiness is the ability to diagnose, mitigate, and communicate under pressure using the tools and constraints you actually have. The goal is consistent performance across the team, not heroics.
Scaling breaks tribal knowledge.
Readiness rarely improves from postmortems alone, especially while hiring fast.
Ramp is chaotic
New engineers join the rotation before they’ve built operational intuition on your systems.
Runbooks drift
Docs exist, but they’re outdated, incomplete, or don’t match how systems fail in practice.
Outcomes hide causes
MTTR is an outcome; it doesn’t tell you what capability is missing, or what to coach next.
A practical readiness framework.
Four dimensions you can train and measure over time.
Detection + triage
Identify which alerts matter and find the fastest path to “what changed” and “what is broken”.
Diagnosis under ambiguity
Narrow hypotheses using metrics/logs/traces without getting stuck in noise or false leads.
Safe mitigation
Use low-risk mitigation paths (flags, rollback, degrade) with verification and blast radius awareness.
Communication + follow-through
Keep a clear comms cadence and ensure the fixes land: runbooks, alerts, telemetry, and guardrails.
Readiness → runbooks → simulations.
Start with clarity, then practice under pressure.
Readiness signals
Baseline diagnosis, mitigation, and comms so the team knows what “good” looks like.
Guided runbooks
Build stepwise playbooks that work under pressure with verification and safe mitigations.
Incident simulations
Run realistic drills that build muscle memory and reveal gaps before the next real incident.
Train continuously and capture the context.
Make “how things work here” teachable without adding another dashboard.
Proactive coaching
Deliver guidance in your messaging platform so learning happens in the flow of work.
Gotcha scanner
Surface TODOs, brittle edges, and recurring failure modes, then turn them into teachable prompts.
Context collector
Capture acronyms, ownership, and decision history right where questions get asked.