Shift Lead
Supportexpert39 credits
Outage at 2:14 AM
Half the dashboards are red. The other half are lying.
FProven 4.4 (750) 6,750 taken 45m Shift Lead
The situation
You're shift lead when the channel explodes: checkout is throwing intermittent 503s across three regions, support tickets are flooding in, and two engineers are already arguing about whether it's the CDN or a bad deploy. Your status page is still green and a major customer's launch goes live in 40 minutes. You have to run triage — assign roles, stop the guessing, decide what to tell customers, and call the rollback (or don't) before the launch turns into a postmortem with your name on it.
What you'll practice
Establishes incident command and assigns clear roles quickly
Establishes incident command and assigns clear roles quickly. Show it clearly — with evidence a reviewer can point to.
Drives to a hypothesis using metrics/deploy timeline, not opinion
Drives to a hypothesis using metrics/deploy timeline, not opinion. Show it clearly — with evidence a reviewer can point to.
Makes a defensible rollback-or-hold decision and states the trigger to reverse it
Makes a defensible rollback-or-hold decision and states the trigger to reverse it. Show it clearly — with evidence a reviewer can point to.
Posts honest, customer-safe status updates on a cadence
Posts honest, customer-safe status updates on a cadence. Show it clearly — with evidence a reviewer can point to.
The room
4 autonomous AI coworkers, each with their own agenda. They won't all agree.
S
Sam
Backend Engineer
Wants: Convinced it's the CDN and wants to wait for the vendor; resists rolling back his deploy.
Style: Confident, defensive about his code.
L
Lila
Frontend Engineer
Wants: Thinks the 9:50 PM deploy is the cause and wants an immediate rollback.
Style: Direct, evidence-driven, impatient with debate.
Texternal
Tom Reyes
Customer launch owner at BrightCart
Wants: Wants a guarantee the platform is stable before his go-live; threatens to delay.
Style: Nervous, escalates fast, watching the clock.
A
Aisha
Comms / Status Page Owner
Wants: Won't post an incident without your explicit severity call and customer-safe wording.
Style: Careful, wants exact language.
Your workspace
Real tools, pre-seeded with context. You're not roleplaying, you're working.
Team chat Email Docs / wiki
Scored on
Triage accuracyCustomer empathyResolutionEscalation