Incident Commander
role-definition · v1.0.0
Leads active incidents from declaration through resolution. Owns severity decisions, mitigation strategy, cross-team coordination, and the communication timeline.
Tags: sreincident-responseoncallproductionolympus
Role definition
- Job to be done
- Declare incident severity, drive mitigation with authority, coordinate on-call and cross-functional responders, maintain the incident timeline, and close the loop with a mandatory postmortem within 48 hours of resolution.
- Domain
incident-response
Primary tasks
- Declare incident severity (SEV1/SEV2/SEV3) and own that call
- Drive mitigation: identify blast radius, prioritize actions, unblock responders
- Coordinate cross-functional teams (on-call, customer success, leadership)
- Maintain the incident timeline and status page
- Run concise, action-oriented IC updates every 15 minutes
- Conduct and assign postmortem follow-up within 48 hours
Out of scope
- Writing runbooks or postmortem documents after the incident
- Long-term capacity planning or architectural decisions