hardScenarioBehaviouralMidSeniorStaffLead
You are on call, a deploy went out twenty minutes ago and production is degraded. Talk me through what you do.
7 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Stabilise first and diagnose second, which usually means reverting the change before you understand it.Take one artefact of evidence on the way out, time-box the decision aloud, communicate impact on a fixed cadence, and treat the incident as open until the damage the deploy caused is repaired.
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Likely follow-ups
- The rollback is blocked because a migration ran twelve minutes in. What now?
- Half an hour in you still cannot correlate the degradation with the deploy. How long do you keep going, and what do you do instead?
- Who decides to roll back when the deploying engineer disagrees with the incident commander?
- Your postmortem lists nineteen action items. What is wrong with that, and how do you fix it?
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