Incident Response Playbooks for Small Teams

Small teams do not need a 40-page IR binder. They need a playbook that answers who decides, who talks, and what happens in the first fifteen minutes — then a path into MSP coverage when the product engineers should sleep.

Severity that people can apply at 2 a.m.

• SEV1 — customers cannot complete a critical path (checkout, login, core API)
• SEV2 — major degradation with a workaround
• SEV3 — limited impact; can wait for business hours

If severity is fuzzy, treat it as one level higher until you know otherwise — then downgrade with a note.

Roles (even if one person wears two hats)

1. Incident lead — owns decisions and the timeline
2. Comms owner — updates stakeholders on a cadence
3. Resolver — digs in systems (may be the same person as lead on a tiny team)

Comms beats silence

Stakeholders fear radio silence more than bad news. Agree on a cadence (for example every 30 minutes for SEV1) and a single source of truth.

Handoff into MSP and recovery

After stabilize: capture what failed, what you tried, and what to monitor. Pair this playbook with observability on-call can use and restore drills that count. Day-two ownership often belongs under MSP coverage so product work is not permanently on-call.

Next step

Read the MSP service page or share how you handle incidents today — we will propose a short playbook and retainer shape.