Resilient Engineering Practices Every High-Growth Tech Team Should Adopt

After years of managing production systems and watching teams handle incidents across multiple companies, one pattern stands out: the teams that handle incidents well aren't necessarily the ones with the best monitoring or the fastest response times. They're the ones who've built resilience into how they work, not just what tools they use.

Building resilient engineering systems isn't about preventing every incident. It's about building teams and processes that recover quickly, learn systematically, and get better after each failure. Early escalation only happens when engineering teams have a blameless culture. If the cost of a false alarm is embarrassment or scrutiny, people will wait, and waiting is how small issues turn into real incidents.

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What Resilient Engineering Actually Means

Resilient engineering is the practice of building systems and teams that can absorb failures, adapt under pressure, and improve from each incident. The goal is not zero downtime, but reducing the blast radius when things break and making sure the same issue doesn't take you down twice.

According to the 2023 State of DevOps Report, elite performers recover from incidents 2,604 times faster than low performers. That gap isn't explained by better technology alone, but by better practices, and the difference shows up in three areas:

1. Detection and response: How quickly teams identify issues and start coordinating.
2. Communication and coordination: How information flows during an incident.
3. Learning and prevention: How teams extract lessons and apply them

Most teams focus heavily on the first, but high-growth teams that scale successfully focus on all three.

Build Psychological Safety Into Your Incident Culture

The biggest barrier to resilient engineering isn't technical but cultural. Engineers hesitate to declare incidents because they don't want the tracking and oversight that comes with it. Customer support teams who've been told off for creating false alarms become scared to escalate. Someone worries about waking up an engineer at 2 am for something that might resolve itself. That hesitation costs time, and during production incidents, time is everything.

One practice that helps is to embrace the concept of "canceled" incidents. When an engineer or support team member escalates something that turns out not to be customer-impacting, don't sweep it under the rug. Mark it as canceled, capture the reason, and move on without blame. Then, review your canceled incidents monthly or quarterly. Use them to:

1. Tune alerting thresholds.
2. Clarify escalation criteria.
3. Identify training gaps for customer success, support, or junior engineers.

This creates a feedback loop that improves over time without punishing people for erring on the side of caution.

Standardize Your Incident Response Workflow

When an incident hits, the last thing you want is engineers debating which communication channel to use or where to document updates. Resilient engineering teams run the same play every time. They have a clear, repeatable process that removes ambiguity from the chaos. At a minimum, your incident workflow should cover:

1. Incident creation with consistent metadata: Every incident should capture the severity, the impacted product or service, and an initial description. This context matters later when you're trying to spot patterns across incidents.
2. Dedicated communication channels: Spin up a dedicated Slack channel for each incident (for teams that communicate in Slack). Keep the noise contained, bring in the right people, and make sure everyone knows where the conversation is happening.
3. Role assignment: Assign an incident commander, the one person who owns coordination, communication, and decision-making. Engineers focus on fixing, and the commander focuses on orchestrating.
4. Status updates at defined intervals: Set expectations for when updates go out. Tie them to your SLAs. A Sev1 might need updates every 30 minutes, while a Sev2 might be every 2 hours. The cadence matters less than the consistency.
5. Resolution and follow-up: Don't close an incident when systems are restored; close it when you've documented what happened, identified root causes, and created action items to prevent recurrence. The teams that struggle most during incidents are the ones making up the process as they go. You can't build resilience without repeatability.

Make Post-Incident Reviews Non-Negotiable

The real work starts after the fire is out. Most teams treat post-incident reviews (PIRs) as optional or performative. They write them when leadership is watching, skip them when timelines are tight, and rarely go back to check if the action items actually got done. That's where resilience dies.

A PIR is not retrospective. PIR is a structured investigation into what broke, why it broke, and what you're going to do so it doesn't break again. It's also your best tool for reducing recurring incidents. Run your PIR process in phases:

Phase 1: Asynchronous data collection

Before you pull people into a meeting, gather the facts. Pull logs, error messages, timeline data, and impact metrics. Document which customers were affected and how. Get this done while the details are fresh.

Phase 2: Structured analysis meeting

Bring the team together. Walk through the auto-generated timeline. ask repeated questions to dig past surface-level causes. Ask: "If we'd done X differently, would this have happened?" Keep going until you hit systemic issues, not just individual mistakes.

Phase 3: Action items with owners and deadlines

Don't close the PIR with vague intentions. Create specific, time-bound action items. Assign owners, set deadlines, and make them visible.

Phase 4: Follow-through enforcement

This is where most teams fail. Action items get created and forgotten. Resilient teams track them, they send reminders when items are overdue, and they keep incidents in a "pending mitigation" state until all action items are complete.

According to research from Jeli, only 23% of incident action items are actually completed. That means 77% of the lessons you're learning are going nowhere. The gap between writing action items and completing them is the gap between knowing what needs to change and actually building resilience.

Instrument Your Incident Metrics But Don't Worship Them

You can't improve what you don't measure. But you also can't let metrics become the goal. Track the basics:

1. MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge): How long after an incident starts before someone acknowledges it
2. MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution): How long it takes to restore service
3. Incident volume by severity: Are you trending up or down on Sev1s and Sev2s?
4. Action item completion rate: What percentage of PIR action items actually get done?
5. Recurring incident themes: Are the same root causes showing up repeatedly?

These numbers tell a story. But they don't tell the whole story. MTTR is useful for spotting trends, but optimizing for faster MTTR at all costs can create bad incentives. Engineers might skip root cause analysis to close tickets faster. They might mark incidents resolved before validating the fix. What you're really measuring is how your team learns. Are you catching incidents faster? Are you preventing repeat incidents? Are you closing the loop on follow-up work? If your metrics are improving but you're still getting paged for the same issues every month, the metrics aren't the problem. The follow-through is.

Build Resilience Into Your Tools, Not Around Them

Your incident process is only as good as the tools that enforce it. If your incident management lives in a patchwork of Jira tickets, Slack threads, Google Docs, and someone's memory, you don't have a process; what you have is good intentions, and it’s a great start that shouldn’t stop there. Resilient engineering teams anchor their incident workflows in the tools their engineers already use. They don't add another dashboard to check or another login to remember.

For teams that use Jira for project management and Slack for communications, when an engineer creates an incident in Jira, a dedicated Slack channel spins up, and the right people get paged. Status updates are tracked there, and SLA reminders go out when timelines slip. When the incident resolves, a PIR ticket is created automatically, with a structured workflow to guide the analysis. That's not magic. It's just process automation where it matters most.

Phoenix Incidents was built for this exact workflow. It's an end-to-end incident management platform that lives inside Jira and Slack. Engineers don't leave their workspace. Leaders get visibility into trends, SLA performance, and action item completion without chasing updates, and the system enforces follow-through by keeping incidents in pending mitigation until all action items are done. The goal is to remove friction from doing the right thing.

Turn Incidents Into Institutional Knowledge

Every incident is a data point. The question is whether you're capturing it in a way that builds institutional knowledge or letting it disappear into history. Resilient engineering teams treat incidents as a knowledge base, not just a problem log, and they look for patterns:

1. Which services are generating the most incidents?
2. Which root causes keep showing up?
3. Are certain types of changes (deployments, config updates) correlated with incidents?

This analysis doesn't happen by accident. It requires structured data capture, consistent tagging, and reporting that surfaces trends over time. When you can see that 40% of your incidents stem from database connection pooling issues, you stop treating each incident as a one-off and fix the underlying problem. That's how you build resilience: by turning reactive firefighting into proactive prevention. The teams that do this well have executive-ready reporting that shows incident volume, resolution trends, and thematic root causes. They use it in QBRs and board meetings to demonstrate product health and incident response maturity.

Start Small, Build Consistency, Then Scale

You don't need to overhaul your entire incident process overnight. Start with one practice, make it consistent, then add the next.

• Week 1: Standardize how incidents are created (severity, impacted product, basic metadata).
• Week 2: Set up a dedicated communication channel for incidents.
• Week 3: Assign incident commanders for Sev1 and Sev2 incidents.
• Week 4: Require PIRs for all Sev1s, with action items and owners.

Build the habit before you build the tooling. Once the process is working manually, automate it with Phoenix Incidents. Resilient engineering is a practice, and the teams that do it well are the ones who recover faster, learn systematically, and turn every incident into an opportunity to get stronger.

Are you ready to build more resilient engineering practices? Phoenix Incidents is an end-to-end incident management platform built directly into Jira and Slack. From incident creation through PIRs and action item follow-through, we help teams respond faster, learn systematically, and prevent repeat incidents.

Book a demo to see how Phoenix Incidents enforces your incident workflow without adding another tool to your stack