Engaging Quickly During Incidents: The team has an organization-wide agreement that engaging quickly during incidents is good. Leaders and VPs are willing to be paged and engaged at any time, and they encourage this to aid in faster time to recovery.
Communicating Quickly: The team recommends communicating to customers as soon as they are confident something is happening, even if the details are limited. They can iterate and provide more depth later, but the initial notification should be sent out quickly.
Prioritizing Mitigation over Root Cause: Engineers are often fascinated by the root cause, but the team has to be disciplined in pushing for mitigation first and learning the root cause later. Mitigation is the key priority.
Scaling Learnings Across the Organization: The team tries to ensure that learnings from incidents are not confined to a single team, but are scaled across the organization so that even teams not involved in the incident can benefit from the insights.
Reviewing Incidents with Empathy: The team approaches the postmortem (or "Coe") process with empathy, both for the people involved and for understanding the context and information they had at the time, rather than just judging decisions with hindsight.
Defining and Sharing Organizational Tenets: The team defines a set of concise principles or "tenets" that the entire organization follows, which help guide decision-making and ensure consistency across teams.