Leading through a major incident, reporting to a board, and building reliability as an organisational habit.
4 questions in Executive & Engineering Leadership.
In a major outage, incident leadership means not running the incident. Confirm a capable commander, ask three questions, then run everything around the response: a business channel with comms, support, legal and security, a fixed update cadence, the trade-offs only you can make, and a shield for responders.
Board reporting on an outage answers four questions: what customers and the business lost, why the system allowed it, what is already fixed, and whether the same class of failure exists elsewhere. Leave out names, the minute-by-minute timeline and unverified numbers, and own the outcome yourself.
Stop making reliability compete item by item. Agree SLOs and an error budget policy with product leadership in advance, hold a measured capacity floor for operational work, price incidents in business terms, and require a named executive to sign any decision to overspend the budget.
In a data breach, engineering owns containment that preserves evidence, a timestamped fact base on what was exposed, and recovery. Bring in legal, privacy, security, communications and executives within hours, because notification duties vary by jurisdiction and are legal decisions.