Product & Engineering

Production breaks. What happens in the next hour matters more than what happens after.

This is the domain where communicating honestly while things are still broken, and reviewing without blame afterward, matter as much as the fix itself.

Other typical workflows in this domain: bug and defect triage, release management, and roadmap development & tracking.

Sample workflow: Technical incident & outage response

Automation = deterministic, rule-based. AI = judgement at the step level — drafting, scoring, matching. Human = decision, relationship, or anything that sets a precedent.

Illustrative — a representative pattern, not a specific client's workflow.

Stage	Mode	What happens
01Detection	Automation	Incident detected by monitoring, ideally before customers report it.
02Declaration	Human	Incident declared at a severity level that drives the response.
03Roles	Human	Commander coordinates; others fix — the commander doesn't debug.
04First update	AI	First external update published fast, honest, and jargon-free.
05Ticket linking	AI	Inbound tickets linked to the incident, answered with current status.
06Diagnosis	AI	Diagnosis run against recent changes; mitigation prioritised over root cause.
07Restoration	Human	Service restored by the fastest safe route.
08Verification	Human	Recovery verified against real user experience, not just dashboards.
09Resolution comms	Human	Resolution communicated; affected customers contacted directly.
10Postmortem	Human	Blameless postmortem held — timeline, causes, actions, no scapegoats.
11Action tracking	Automation	Postmortem actions tracked to completion like any other committed work.
12Metrics review	AI	Frequency, MTTR, and recurrence reviewed at the operating cadence.

01Detection

Automation

Incident detected by monitoring, ideally before customers report it.

02Declaration

Human

Incident declared at a severity level that drives the response.

03Roles

Human

Commander coordinates; others fix — the commander doesn't debug.

04First update

First external update published fast, honest, and jargon-free.

05Ticket linking

Inbound tickets linked to the incident, answered with current status.

06Diagnosis

Diagnosis run against recent changes; mitigation prioritised over root cause.

07Restoration

Human

Service restored by the fastest safe route.

08Verification

Human

Recovery verified against real user experience, not just dashboards.

09Resolution comms

Human

Resolution communicated; affected customers contacted directly.

10Postmortem

Human

Blameless postmortem held — timeline, causes, actions, no scapegoats.

11Action tracking

Automation

Postmortem actions tracked to completion like any other committed work.

12Metrics review

Frequency, MTTR, and recurrence reviewed at the operating cadence.

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