When designing an effective on-call schedule, it's essential to consider the team's capacity, context, and coverage. This involves knowing who's available, what they're working on, and how much they can handle, as well as defining clear roles and expectations for each person. Adding depth with secondary support, such as a rotating backup or follow-the-sun model, helps reduce stress and provides an extra layer of confidence when incidents get complicated. A fair rotation spreads the load evenly across the team while allowing everyone to build confidence and skill responding to real-world issues. Automation makes it work in practice once the schedule is built, ensuring alerts are routed to the right person at the right time through the right channel. Ultimately, a thoughtful on-call schedule builds resilience into the team, creates faster and calmer incident responses, and helps people feel supported rather than stretched.