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Technical leadership: reviews, mentoring, incidents and influence · Expert · Lesson 84 of 98 · 27 min video, then about 7 hours of practice
Leading an incident as incident commander
After this you can run an incident call: assign roles, keep the response coordinated, drive towards mitigation and keep stakeholders informed.
Why it matters
In a serious incident the most valuable person is often not the one with the deepest knowledge but the one coordinating. The incident commander does not debug; they make sure someone is debugging, someone is communicating, decisions are being made and recorded, and nobody is duplicating work. Watch the simulated call to see the roles in action, then read PagerDuty's open incident-response documentation, which many companies adopt directly. Trap: the most senior engineer becoming commander and also trying to fix it. Pick one job.
How to use this resource
A full simulated incident call showing commander, deputy, scribe, subject-matter experts and communications liaison working together.