Startup Incident Response SOP.
A small-team incident system for restoring service, protecting users, communicating clearly, and learning without blame.
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Operating standard
Control without the corporate sludge.
Owner
The incident commander for the event; the engineering or security lead owns the SOP.
Response
Critical incidents acknowledged within 10 minutes and command assigned within 15 minutes. Customer updates every 30 minutes until stable. Other incidents follow the published severity table.
Metric
Median time to acknowledge and restore decreases while repeat incidents from the same cause approach zero.
If nobody owns the process, the founder owns every emergency.
Purpose
Reduce customer harm and recovery time by establishing command, severity, communication, evidence, and follow-up before an emergency.
When it applies
Use for outages, severe degradation, security events, data loss, incorrect transactions, privacy exposure, or any production issue requiring coordinated response.
Do not start blind.
Trigger to outcome. No meeting required.
- 01
Acknowledge the report and open one incident channel and timeline.
- 02
Assign an incident commander, technical lead, and communications owner; one person may hold multiple roles in a tiny team.
- 03
Classify severity using customer, data, security, revenue, and duration impact.
- 04
Contain harm first by disabling, isolating, rolling back, or rate limiting when safe.
- 05
Investigate with timestamps, preserve evidence, and test one hypothesis at a time.
- 06
Update internal stakeholders and affected customers at the severity cadence.
- 07
Restore service, verify the critical customer workflow, and continue monitoring.
- 08
Close the incident only after stability; complete a blameless review with owners and deadlines.
Authority must be explicit.
Know when to stop.
Escalate immediately for suspected breach, personal-data exposure, financial loss, safety risk, unavailable backups, or impact beyond the team's capability. Contact the named external specialists where required.
If it is not recorded, it did not happen.
Make the generic parts real.
How teams break the process.
Letting everyone debug while nobody commands
Making risky changes without a timeline
Writing a postmortem that blames a person and fixes no system
Related startup SOPs.
Make the process executable.
Download it, assign the real owners, set the thresholds, and test it with someone who did not write it.