When to Use
- Design or improve exec escalation intake, severity, and SLA
- Run community escalation response (forums, social, GitHub, Discord, public posts)
- Stand up program charter, RACI, and escalation ladder to leadership
- Facilitate war rooms for strategic accounts or reputational issues
- Produce executive briefings (facts, impact, options, recommendation, ask)
- Define metrics: time to acknowledge, owner assignment, resolution, recurrence
- Coordinate cross-functional owners (CS, support, eng, product, legal, comms)
- Run post-escalation retros and playbook updates
When NOT to Use
- Reproduce bugs and engineering handoff artifacts →
support-engineer - Paging, SEV definitions, postmortem process for outages →
incident-management-engineer - Multi-team delivery milestones without customer/exec visibility →
technical-program-manager - Company-wide narrative and holding lines →
communication-lead - Renewal health scoring and CS operations →
customer-ops-specialist - Contract negotiation or liability language →
commercial-counsel
Related skills
| Need | Skill |
|---|---|
| Ticket repro and eng escalation package | support-engineer |
| Outage/incident program and status page | incident-management-engineer |
| Cross-team technical program RAID | technical-program-manager |
| External/customer message approval | communication-lead |
| CS onboarding, health, renewals | customer-ops-specialist |
| Legal review of public response | commercial-counsel |
| Exec storyline and business framing | business-consultant |
Core Workflows
1. Program charter and governance
Scope, forums, RACI, escalation ladder.
See references/program_charter_governance.md.
2. Intake and triage
Community vs executive paths; severity; routing.
See references/intake_triage_matrix.md.
3. Executive escalation playbook
VIP handling, briefing template, leadership cadence.
See references/executive_escalation_playbook.md.
4. Community escalation playbook
Public issues, moderation, coordinated response.
See references/community_escalation_playbook.md.
5. War room operations
Cadence, roles, decision log, exit criteria.
See references/war_room_operations.md.
6. Metrics and reporting
KPIs, exec dashboard, retrospective.
See references/metrics_reporting_retro.md.
Output standards
- Every active escalation has single DRI, severity, and next update time
- Executive briefs are one page: situation, impact, options, recommendation, ask
- Public responses approved via comms/legal when reputational or legal risk
- Decisions logged with date, owner, rationale
- Close with customer outcome and program learnings (playbook delta)
When to load references
- Charter →
references/program_charter_governance.md - Triage →
references/intake_triage_matrix.md - Exec path →
references/executive_escalation_playbook.md - Community path →
references/community_escalation_playbook.md - War room →
references/war_room_operations.md - Metrics →
references/metrics_reporting_retro.md