on-call-design

What problem does it solve?

Engineering teams struggle with inconsistent on-call rotations, noisy alerts, unclear escalation, and burnout; this skill provides a repeatable framework to design rotations, escalation tiers, runbooks, and compensation to improve response time and engineer wellbeing.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Rotation patterns: Recommended schedules (weekly, follow-the-sun, primary/secondary, hybrid) and a suggested weekly primary/secondary pattern with handoff rules.
• Escalation policies: Step-based escalation with SLA timeouts and notification targets to model PagerDuty/OpsGenie-style flows.
• Runbook standards: Required runbook contents including service overview, health checks, common failure modes, contact lists, and escalation criteria.
• Compensation & fairness: Options for pay, comp time, reduced load, and metrics to track parity and burnout (pages per person, MTTA, satisfaction).
• Quality gates & mitigation: Checklist for coverage, noise thresholds, automation criteria for recurring pages, and blameless postmortems.

Quick Start

Create an on-call plan for a production service that defines a weekly primary/secondary rotation, escalation SLAs, required runbook sections, and a compensation approach to prevent burnout.