8 minute read

Production engineers (PE) are expected to be incident management experts. Still, incident handling is difficult, often messy, and exhausting. We encounter new incidents, search high and low for possible explanations, sometimes tunnel on symptoms, and, under pressure, forget some best practices.

At Shopify, we care not only about handling incidents quickly and efficiently, but also PE well-being. We have a special IMOC (incident manager on call) rotation and an incident chatbot to assist IMOCs. This post provides an overview of incident management at Shopify, the responsibility of different roles during an incident, and how our chatbot works to support our team.

Daniella Niyonkuru