Incident Response
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Assign roles, contacts, evidence sources, containment authority, communication thresholds, and rehearsal before an incident.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain incident response in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Assign roles, contacts, evidence sources, containment authority, communication thresholds, and rehearsal before an incident.
- Recognise this material risk: confusion and missing access extend customer harm while evidence is lost.
- Use this review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong. This lesson gives you a concrete question to take into a build brief, proposal review, or product decision.
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? The course example is A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations; use it to decide what evidence would justify the choice before a builder implements it.
What Does Incident Response Mean for Your Product?
A founder is clarifying who controls the product and how the company will respond when something goes wrong.
Use the illustrative service for this course (A small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations) to make the choice concrete. Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident?
Technical term
Incident Response
Incident response is the prepared process for detecting, containing, investigating, communicating, recovering from, and learning after a harmful event.
How Should a Founder Use Incident Response?
For a small team's customer portal with contractors and external integrations, ask what would happen if confusion and missing access extend customer harm while evidence is lost.
For this decision, the useful standard is that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Decision: Assign roles, contacts, evidence sources, containment authority, communication thresholds, and rehearsal before an incident.
- Evidence to request: show that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- Owner: name who will respond if confusion and missing access extend customer harm while evidence is lost.
- Record the result in the security, ownership, and handover record.
- Practical review: Exercise contractor offboarding, secret rotation, backup restore, and the first incident handoff for the customer portal.
How Do You Choose an Approach to Incident Response?
Who controls each critical account and can another authorised person recover the service during an incident? Assign roles, contacts, evidence sources, containment authority, communication thresholds, and rehearsal before an incident.
The risk is that confusion and missing access extend customer harm while evidence is lost. Compare a simpler option with the proposed one, including who will operate either choice.
- Describe the user or business outcome that must be protected.
- Identify the most credible failure and its consequence.
- Compare the simplest adequate approach with one realistic alternative.
- Set a review point for when the decision may need to change.
What Evidence Should You Accept for Incident Response?
What Warning Signs Should You Look For?
- The proposal does not address this risk: confusion and missing access extend customer harm while evidence is lost.
- Nobody can show whether access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual.
- The decision has no named owner or review point.
What Should You Ask a Consultant?
- What changes for the user if we choose this approach to incident response?
- How have we reduced or accepted this risk: confusion and missing access extend customer harm while evidence is lost.
- Can you demonstrate that access, ownership, recovery, and response responsibilities are explicit and can be exercised without one individual?
- Who owns the result, and when will we reconsider it?
Key takeaway
Key Takeaway
Assign roles, contacts, evidence sources, containment authority, communication thresholds, and rehearsal before an incident. Ask for evidence against the specific risk: confusion and missing access extend customer harm while evidence is lost.