The dashboard was green

A status board can stay green during an outage if it watches the load balancer instead of the thing customers use. Same room as a prototype that passes in a notebook. Alert never fired. You found out from a VP in a hallway. Then two days reconstructing one number.

You did not fail. The board watched the wrong door.

Do this before the next hire

Write four fields on a sticky note. That is the brief. The LinkedIn title is not.

1. Project or decision
2. System or network
3. Due date
4. What being wrong costs

If you cannot fill those, you are hiring a title. Finish this sentence too: this person owns _____ when it breaks at two a.m.