While playbooks help document information and build consistency, they can also become bloated and overly prescriptive. This talk provides strategies for building adaptive incident response programs that work in complex, real-world incidents.

How many of us have walked away from a retrospective where “update X playbook” accounted for the bulk of the post-incident learning? As we establish and evolve our incident response programs, playbooks are a useful tool to document information and build consistency. But they also can easily become a dumping ground for rigid process and oversimplified approaches that don’t work in the ambiguous and complex real world incidents we experience. In this talk, I’ll break down three pillars for building incident response programs that build consistency and alignment while leaving room for judgment and agility. Pillar 1: Severity Levels (How to establish severity levels that reflect your business priorities) Pillar 2: Heuristics (Mental shortcuts for ambiguous decision-making) Pillar 3: Tooling (Eliminating toil to leave room for the important decisions)

Ashley Sawatsky is an expert in incident management and communication, with a focus on the SaaS world. In her 6+ years of experience building and scaling Shopify's incident response program, she developed the ability to fluently translate the technical aspects of SRE incident response to Legal, PR, Customer Support, and Executive stakeholders. Now, she works at Rootly as Senior Developer Relations Advocate, where she engages with the SRE and incident response communities, and consults with customers from the world's largest tech companies—like Canva, Figma, NVIDIA, and more—on their incident response strategies.