Storytelling as an Incident Management Skill

Managing incidents well requires a number of skills — debugging and systems understanding, strong communication, and high-speed project management — but we rarely talk about the power of storytelling in our incident management loop. From oncall preparation, to incident handling, to postmortem creation, skill at storytelling can support and even improve our engineering skills. Establishing a setting, building a coherent narrative, and understanding your characters builds memorable and compelling communication that can level up all stages of your incident management. Laura de Vesine is a 20+ year software industry veteran. She has spent the last 8 years in SRE working in incident analysis and prevention, chaos engineering, and the intersection of technology and organizational culture. Laura