Vanessa Huerta Granda, Enova International
Incident Command isn’t a badge for the most senior engineer. It’s a sociotechnical leadership skill that keeps teams aligned, reduces cognitive load, and builds trust during outages. This talk shares lessons from a decade building IC programs across SRE organizations; including how to identify, train, and support effective Incident Commanders without burning out your best responders.
Vanessa is a Technology Manager for Resilience Engineering at Enova. Previously she worked at Jeli.io helping companies make the most of their incidents. Vanessa has built and scaled incident command programs across multiple engineering organizations, training hundreds of engineers in high-pressure leadership, on-call operations, and outage communication. Her work focuses on the human side of reliability; creating sustainable practices that reduce burnout while improving resilience. She speaks frequently on incident command, SRE culture, and decision-making under uncertainty.
author = {Vanessa Huerta Granda},
title = {So You Want a New Incident {Commander{\textemdash}Lessons} from Building Incident Response Teams},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
