Order in Chaos

When my friend’s startup blew up last quarter, it was like Survivor: DevOps Edition. Their product—months in the making—crashed hard. Data vanished. Users freaked out. Engineers scrambled like it was overtime in a soccer match and no one knew where the ball was.

The vibe? Pure chaos. A mix of dread, confusion, and that weird existential feeling you get when you realize no one's really steering the ship.

This post is for every startup running on caffeine, five engineers, and dreams—without a real plan for when things go sideways. I’m going to show you how to steal a page from FEMA’s Incident Command System (ICS)—yeah, the one they use for wildfires and hurricanes—and use it to bring order to your next tech disaster.

No consultants. No boot camps. Just stuff that works.

The Problem: Panic Is the Default

Startups are built for speed, not resilience. But when something breaks—and something always breaks—the lack of process turns a bad night into a full-blown crisis.

Here’s the scary part: operational screw-ups during incidents are often what tip startups over the edge. The business press loves to blame market fit or funding, but behind the scenes? It's often a hot mess of disorganized incident response.

Two Real-World Faceplants

1. Techtronix
One config error + a buggy CI/CD pipeline = a nightmare.

• User retention tanked by 65%
• $1.2 million in lost revenue
• No roles. No plan. Just everyone yelling and no one fixing.

2. InnoBug
They got breached. User data leaked. The team froze.

• 72 hours to patch the mess
• Lost 30,000 users
• $400K in damage
  No clear ownership. Just duct tape and regrets.

These aren’t rare. They’re just the ones people talk about.

ICS 101: Borrowing Structure from Disaster Pros

The Incident Command System is how FEMA and fire crews stay organized when everything's falling apart. It’s all about roles. Who leads. Who fixes. Who talks. Who tracks.

The core roles:

• Incident Commander – Makes the big calls
• Operations Lead – Fixes stuff, fast
• Communications Officer – Tells everyone what’s up (without causing panic)
• Planning – Keeps track of what’s happened and what’s next
• Logistics – Handles tools, access, and support

Now, your five-person team isn’t FEMA. But here’s the good news: ICS scales down really well.

ICS for Startups: The Lightweight Version

Here’s how to apply ICS without turning your team into a bureaucracy:

The magic here? Clarity. Everyone knows their lane. No duplicated effort. No chaos.

Automate the Basics

Even a scrappy little checklist can save your neck when an outage hits.

Try this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Incident Management Checklist"
echo "1. Identify the incident"
echo "2. Assign the Incident Commander"
echo "3. Notify stakeholders"
echo "4. Assess impact and scope"
echo "5. Implement mitigations"
echo "6. Log decisions and actions"
echo "7. Plan post-incident review"

Low effort. High return. That’s the goal.

Terraform + AWS: Alerts That Actually Work

Want real-time alerts when stuff breaks? Here’s a basic Terraform setup using AWS SNS:

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

resource "aws_sns_topic" "incident_alerts" {
  name = "incident-alerts"
}

resource "aws_sns_topic_subscription" "email_alerts" {
  topic_arn = aws_sns_topic.incident_alerts.arn
  protocol  = "email"
  endpoint  = "oncall@yourcompany.com"
}

You can swap out email for Slack, SMS, whatever works best for your team. The point? You shouldn't hear about an outage from your customers.

What You Get: Speed, Sanity, and Trust

No system stops incidents from happening. Startups are messy. Always will be. But a clear structure helps you:

• React faster
• Avoid duplicated effort
• Keep your team focused
• Earn back customer trust
• Write better postmortems (which means fewer repeat disasters)

It’s the difference between responding and panicking.

One Last Thing

Startups thrive in controlled chaos. But uncontrolled chaos? That’s where things die.

Adopting ICS isn’t about turning into a government agency. It’s about giving your team a playbook when the heat is on. So when the fire hits, you don’t freeze.

You don’t need more engineers.

You need less confusion.