Production outages can be extremely costly. For a global business, just one minute of downtime can exceed an engineer’s annual compensation. So, how can we build smooth and efficient incident response?

After over a decade of building and operating systems used by millions of people, I’ve distilled an approach that helps engineer strengthen their teams' incident management practices, based on a simple formula:

Outage Duration = Time to Detect + Time to Acknowledge + Time to Repair.

To resolve outages quickly, we need to be efficient in all three stages. But shortening the time of each stage requires a coordinated mix of technical, process, and cultural changes.

We’ll unpack each component and examine practical strategies—from tooling investments and observability practices to cultural habits and on-call readiness—that can dramatically shorten outage duration.
By the end of the talk, you’ll learn how to set up your team for success when they face an outage.