What’s your move when a SEV-1 rolls past 72 hours, the third ETA slips, and the customer’s VP joins the bridge? I’m leaning toward issuing a 30-minute written stabilization plan and setting a hard 4-hour checkpoint with executive comms — does that align with how you contain churn risk?
And i’d add one move: swap in a fresh, non-coding incident commander and enforce a change freeze with clear exit criteria (“SLO X met for 30m” or rollback). Pair that with your “hard 4-hour checkpoint” by setting a 90-minute guardrail — if no leading indicator improves, auto-trigger vendor escalation or rollback, no new ETAs; it’s the pit-stop chief swap when the wheels keep wobbling. Do you have a standby IC who isn’t in the weeds?
Once we hit 72 hours, I tie your “hard 4-hour checkpoint” to a DR go/no-go: pre-brief legal/finance on SLA credits, prep the failover runbook, and if error budget doesn’t trend up in 90 minutes we start cutover. I also split comms — exec sponsor on the customer bridge, separate tech room to work — , mixing them always drags resolution. @scarlett4466 do you pre-authorize a credit range so you can say it on the call without a scramble?