The first ninety minutes of an outage
Severity labels without decision rights leave payment platforms improvising while partners wait for a call.
Incident readiness audits start with who can declare a payment severity and who must notify acquiring partners. Ambiguity here costs minutes you cannot buy back.
A short tabletop beats a thick playbook nobody has opened. Script the first ninety minutes and watch where the room stalls.
Evidence capture — timestamps, affected MIDs, customer messaging — should be templated before the event, not invented after.
Reliability is a practice. Rehearse it on a calendar, then refresh the template when roles change.