Handling Incidents in Startups: Building Resilience and Trust

In the fast-paced world of startups, encountering system issues is not a matter of if, but when. How you respond to these incidents can significantly impact your company's reputation, customer trust, and overall success. Developing a robust incident response strategy is crucial for minimising disruption and maintaining a resilient and reliable system. Here's a guide on how startups should handle incidents, inspired by the practices that helped my own company, Qudini, thrive.

1. Embrace a Strong DevOps Culture

A strong DevOps culture is the cornerstone of effective incident management. By fostering a collaborative environment where developers and operations teams work closely together, you can respond quickly to issues and minimise downtime. This culture encourages shared responsibility, continuous improvement, and a proactive approach to system health.

2. Immediate Response: Andon Cord

When an incident occurs, it's vital for developers to stop what they are doing and focus on resolving the issue immediately. This practice, inspired by the Andon Cord used in manufacturing, ensures that problems are addressed promptly, preventing further escalation. Empower your team to pull the Andon Cord when necessary and prioritize incident resolution above all else.

3. Effective Communication During Incidents

Clear and timely communication is key during an incident. Having a well-defined incident response process with allocated roles and responsibilities, communication protocols, and escalation paths ensures that everyone knows what to do and can act quickly. Regularly update relevant stakeholders, including internal teams and external customers, to maintain transparency and trust.

Top Tip: Create a slack channel for all internal comms for each incident. Paste in screenshots from monitoring, or any errors you find as these can be helpful when writing your timeline in the post mortem.

4. Conduct Blameless Post Mortems

After an incident, conducting an internal blameless post mortem is essential. This process allows your team to analyse what went wrong, why it happened, and how to prevent similar issues in the future. Utilise the ‘Five Whys’ for root causes. Focus on learning and improvement rather than assigning blame, fostering a culture of openness and continuous development.

Tip: We used a version similar to the Pager Duty version: https://response.pagerduty.com/after/post_mortem_template/ Ensure everyone helps contribute and once its complete distribute for review, and then publish to your team and all stakeholders.

5. Customer-Facing Post Mortems

For B2B products, it's equally important to conduct customer-facing post mortems. Being transparent with your customers about what went wrong, why it happened, and what steps you've taken to prevent recurrence can significantly enhance their trust and loyalty. Customers appreciate honesty and proactive measures to ensure their experience is not disrupted again.

Tip: Know your audience, i have found that adding enough technical information to explain the issue without getting too deep works best. Most customers are more interested in what we've done to ensure it wont happen again. There are lots of examples online of public reports. This from Gitlab in my opinion goes into a bit too much technical detail: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/ where as this one feels about right: https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-cloud-incident-report-feburary-4-2019

6. Prioritize Follow-Up Items

The follow-up items identified during post-mortems should always be prioritized. If an issue has already caused a problem, there's a high chance it could happen again. Addressing these items promptly not only fixes the immediate issue but also strengthens your system's resilience.

7. Improve Observability

Sometimes, the root cause of an incident is the lack of visibility into the system. Enhancing observability through better monitoring and alerting tools can significantly reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve issues. Invest in tools that provide comprehensive insights into your system's health and performance.

Top Tip: Include business metrics too. It makes it much easier to see if there is a particular customer action causing a spike.

8. Prepare with Game Days

Prepare your developers for real incidents by conducting "Game Days." These simulated disaster scenarios help teams practice their response and improve their skills. Tools like AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) and Netflix Chaos Monkey are ideal for creating controlled chaos and testing your system's resilience.

Honestly at Qudini this is something we didn’t do as well as perhaps we should have. By involving all team members in the real issues and post mortem we made up for this along with juniors shadowing the on call rota.

9. Transition to Continuous Deployment

Moving from large scheduled releases to more frequent continuous deployment with feature flag controls can build confidence in your releases and trust with your customers. At Qudini, this shift allowed us to transition from cautious large releases to a true SaaS model where customers trusted our frequent updates.

10. Implement Rollback Mechanisms and Feature Flags

In enterprise systems, incidents can escalate quickly. Having mechanisms in place to rollback changes and feature flags that act as kill switches is crucial. These tools provide quick ways to mitigate issues and restore service without significant downtime.

11. Consider Microservices Architecture

Transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices can enhance fault isolation and resilience. However, this approach brings its own challenges, which can be addressed in a separate discussion. Microservices allow you to contain issues within specific services, minimising the impact on the overall system.

12. Start Small and Build Up

If you don't have any of these practices in place, start with the basics and gradually build up. The key is continuous improvement. Over time, your team will develop a natural response to incidents, and the frequency of issues will decrease as your system becomes more resilient. At Qudini we certainly didn’t have this perfect from the start, and we had our fair share of issues in the early years. Only by making these improvements were we able to get to the point of multiple releases per day and near zero downtime.

13. Seek Expert Help

If you're struggling to implement these practices or need guidance, consider bringing in a fractional CTO with experience in incident management. Their expertise can help get your processes on track and ensure your startup is prepared for any challenges.

Building a resilient startup requires a proactive approach to incident management. By fostering a strong DevOps culture, prioritising communication, learning from incidents, and continuously improving, you can minimize disruptions and build trust with your customers.