Most escalation policies are written once, during a quiet week, and then ignored during the incident they were meant for. The fix is to design them around how people really respond at night.
Fewer levels, clearer owners
Two or three levels cover almost every team:
- The on-call engineer for the service that alerted.
- A secondary who can step in if the first person is unreachable.
- A lead who can make decisions and pull in other teams.
Timeouts that match reality
If acknowledging an alert usually takes eight minutes, a five-minute timeout wakes the secondary for no reason and teaches everyone to ignore the policy. Review real acknowledgement times every quarter and adjust.