Describe your role in a production incident.

Question

Accepted Answer

They want to see you stay **calm, methodical, and blameless** under fire — restore service first, diagnose second, and prevent recurrence third. Use **STAR**.

## How to approach it

```text
INCIDENT ORDER
1. Stabilize — stop the bleeding (rollback, failover, mitigate)
2. Communicate — keep stakeholders updated on a clear channel
3. Diagnose — root cause once it's stable, not during
4. Prevent — a blameless post-mortem with action items
```

## Worked example

```text
S: A deploy caused checkout errors for ~15% of users.
T: I was on call and had to restore service fast.
A: I rolled back the deploy first (service recovered in minutes), posted updates
   every 10 minutes, then traced the cause to an unhandled null from a new API
   field. I added a guard and a contract test.
R: Downtime stayed under 20 minutes. The post-mortem added the missing test to
   CI so it can't recur.
```

## Good vs weak

```text
✓ Mitigate first, communicate, blameless follow-up
✗ Debugging live while users are down
✗ Blaming the person who deployed
```

## Why it matters

Incidents test composure — the team needs steady hands, not panic, when things are broken.

A blameless approach keeps people honest about causes, which is the only way to actually prevent repeats.

How you handle the worst day says more about your seniority than how you handle the good ones.