Escalation
Escalate when#
- The blast radius is growing rather than holding steady.
- The fix would touch stored data.
- Customer data may have been exposed, lost, or sent to the wrong recipient.
- You have been stuck longer than the window your team agreed.
- The response needs a decision only someone accountable can make — a public statement, a refund, taking a product offline.
Fill this in: the window. Somewhere between fifteen and thirty minutes works for most teams. A number that exists is worth more than the perfect number invented at 3am.
How to escalate#
Use whatever actually wakes someone up. A message in a room nobody is watching is not an escalation, it is a hope.
What is broken, since when, what you have already tried, and what you want from them. The last one is the one people forget, and it is the only one that gets you help rather than questions.
Escalating adds people; it does not move the responsibility until someone says, in writing, that they are taking it.
If you are genuinely passing it on, say so and get an acknowledgement. Two people each believing the other has it is the most expensive minute in any incident.
Anything involving deleted, overwritten or exposed customer records is escalated immediately, regardless of how confident you are. Recovering data gets harder by the hour, and the decisions are not yours to carry alone.
Who to reach#
Fill this in: name the levels and how to reach each at every hour of the day. A path invented under pressure is not a path.