5 Ways to Improve Team Health With Effective On-Call Handoffs

The concept of "You code it, you own it" places the responsibility on engineers to address issues with the software and systems they develop, which often leads to a conflict between engineers and managers who prioritize new features over operational resilience. This misalignment can result in costly outages that affect the team, business, and customers. To mitigate these issues, it's important to implement effective on-call handoff sessions that involve both engineers and non-engineers, fostering empathy and understanding across the organization. These sessions should be used to review operational problems, discuss solutions, and promote a culture of observability by examining metrics and disruption statistics. By taking action on areas of concern identified during these sessions and reinforcing clear expectations for on-call duties, organizations can improve system stability and engineer well-being. Encouraging participation from all stakeholders in these processes helps ensure a holistic approach to continuous improvement and successful product delivery.