Production SaaS platforms require operations maintenance, support, tech debt payments, bug fixes, and more. This isn’t even counting the feature work customers, sales, and PM are asking for.

So with all this work to do, how can we manage what to do when? How can we as a team agree on our shared day-to-day priorities? This is a critical challenge to solve, especially now that remote work is so prevalent.

Planning is critical to running a successful War Game. One of the core goals is for the incident to feel real, so expect to spend 3-4x the amount of time planning the War Game as you spend running it.

In the first article of this series, we identified a few challenges of production incidents. They’re fast, filled with pressure, and are (hopefully) brand new failures. If the best-case scenario is a new failure (remember: repeated failures mean we never solved it the first time), how can we practice?

It’s 3 AM and your phone is ringing. There’s only one number you let ring through your Do Not Disturb settings. You open one eye and look at the first of 12 on-call notifications.

“Database down. Need help.”

It’s gonna be a long night.