During a major incident, how do you handle communication with customers, support and leadership?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Assign a dedicated communications lead separate from the responders
- Post early, honest updates on a status page and internal channel
- Give a regular update cadence even when there is no news
- Describe impact and next update time, not speculation
- Close with a resolution notice and follow-up postmortem
Model answer
I make sure the incident commander assigns a communications lead, so the people fixing the problem are not interrupted by questions. The comms lead posts a first update quickly, within about 15 minutes, on the status page and the internal incident channel, even if it only says we are investigating elevated errors in checkout. Updates focus on user impact, what we are doing and when the next update will come, for example every 30 minutes, and we keep that promise even when there is nothing new. We avoid guessing about root cause or blame. Support gets a short message they can share with customers, and leadership gets a summary of impact and risk. When it is resolved we post a clear resolution notice, and later share the postmortem summary with the people who were affected.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed medium round and get scored on every answer.
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