Incident Command for Engineering Leaders
Most teams treat incidents as technical failures. Great teams treat them as coordination failures under stress. This session gives engineering leaders a practical incident command system they can apply immediately: roles, communication cadence, decision logging, escalation paths, and postmortems that create learning instead of fear.
When incidents hit, technology matters — but leadership determines outcomes. This session walks through an operating model for incident response that scales across teams and time zones without chaos.
We cover clear roles (incident commander, comms lead, operations lead, and scribe), fast status loops, and decision frameworks that lower risk under pressure. You’ll see practical templates for timeline capture, stakeholder communication, and recovery prioritization.
We also cover the most ignored part: after-action learning. You’ll leave with a blameless postmortem structure that improves systems, process, and team behavior instead of assigning guilt.
Includes realistic scenarios, facilitation techniques for cross-functional pressure moments, and a leadership checklist you can use in your next production incident.
Outcomes:
- Reduce time-to-understand and time-to-recover
- Communicate clearly with executives and customers
- Build operational maturity without blame culture
- Replace panic theater with dependable response habits
No panic theater. Just practical leadership patterns that work when production is on fire and Slack has gone feral.
About Ken Sipe
Ken is a distributed application engineer. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on containers, container orchestration, high scale micro-service design and continuous delivery systems.
Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Great Indian Developer Summit (GIDS), and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.
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