A production incident is happening and eight engineers are on the call. What is your role as tech lead?

Summary

Establish structure: name an incident commander who coordinates but doesn't debug, an operations lead through whom all changes go, and a communications lead with a fixed update cadence — then drive towards mitigation before root cause.

Longer Answer

Without roles, people make conflicting changes and stakeholders interrupt the debuggers. Mitigate first (roll back, fail over, disable a feature), make one change at a time, announce changes before making them, and post updates every 30 minutes in one channel. The tech lead can be the commander or the operations lead, but not both. Afterwards, run a blameless postmortem with contributing factors and tracked action items.

Key Points

• Roles: commander, operations, communications
• Mitigate first; one change at a time
• Blameless postmortem with tracked actions

Deep dive: Leading Incidents and Blameless Postmortems

What interviewers look for

Calm structure under pressure and understanding of incident roles.

Red flags

• Jumping in to debug while also answering stakeholders
• Postmortems that assign blame