Training New Incident Commanders: Pokemon Style!

Wednesday, 8 October, 2025 - 13:5014:10

Laura de Vesine, Datadog Inc

Training engineers on the skills to be effective incident commanders (communication, coordination, delegation, etc.) can be a challenge—we tend to get bogged down in whether a scenario is "realistic" enough—and then derailed by debugging, instead of focusing on incident command itself. What if we solved for that by removing engineering from practice scenarios entirely? This talk presents a real, in-use training and practical exercise for incident command skills doing just that, by using a made-up, lighthearted scenario (with Pokemon!).

Laura de Vesine is a 25+ year software industry veteran. She has spent the last 9 years in SRE working in incident analysis and prevention, systems understanding, chaos engineering, and the intersection of technology and organizational culture. Laura is currently a staff engineer at Datadog, Inc. She also has a PhD in computer science, but mostly her kittens nap on her diploma.

BibTeX
@conference {311868,
author = {Laura de Vesine},
title = {Training New Incident Commanders: Pokemon Style!},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}

Presentation Video