Incident Management for Teams Without a Dedicated SRE: A Practical Guide

Most incident management advice assumes you have a real SRE function already in place. Dedicated rotations, formal roles, long severity docs, postmortem templates with twelve sections. That advice is useful in the right environment. It just doesn't map especially well to a smaller team where the CTO, the senior backend engineer, and the person who shipped the last deploy are all effectively part of the incident process. If you're running with a lean engineering team and no dedicated SRE, the goal isn't sophistication. The goal is clarity. When something breaks, you want three things to be true: you notice quickly, the right person knows what to do next, and the team fixes the underlying issue often enough that the same incident doesn't keep resurfacing. That's the version of incident management that actually helps when your current process is still "someone posts in Slack and we figure it out from there." What You Actually Need (vs. What SRE Content Tells You You Need) For a small team