Project Context
Anthropic’s Claude API platform has had 6 Sev1/Sev2 incidents in the last quarter, including elevated latency, degraded tool-use reliability, and one customer-visible outage affecting enterprise traffic. Postmortems are being written, but the same classes of failures are recurring and remediation work is slipping behind roadmap commitments.
You are the Engineering Manager for a 9-person reliability-focused team supporting Claude API production systems, in partnership with product engineering, security, and developer infrastructure. The CTO has asked for a concrete 12-week program to ensure incident learnings turn into durable operational improvements before a major enterprise launch at the end of the quarter.
Key Stakeholders
- Reliability engineers want fewer repeat pages and better follow-through on action items.
- Product engineering wants to protect roadmap capacity for enterprise launch commitments.
- Security wants stronger incident classification, auditability, and evidence of control improvements.
- Support and Sales want clearer customer communication after incidents.
Constraints
- 12-week timeline before the enterprise launch
- 9 engineers total; only 4 can spend more than 30% of time on incident-learning work
- $120,000 budget for tooling, training, and contractor support
- 18 open postmortem action items already in backlog
- No freeze on feature development; enterprise launch scope cannot slip by more than 1 week
Complications
- Two recent incidents involved different teams, and ownership of follow-up work is disputed.
- Engineers view postmortems as high-overhead and low-impact because fewer than 40% of action items from the last quarter were completed on time.
- The VP of Product is pushing to defer reliability work until after launch unless you can show a clear prioritization framework.
Deliverables
- Create a 12-week execution plan to improve how Anthropic learns from incidents and converts postmortems into shipped changes.
- Define a prioritization and ownership model for remediation work across teams.
- Propose success metrics and review mechanisms to measure whether repeat incidents are actually decreasing.
- Recommend how you would handle stakeholder conflict between launch delivery and reliability investments.
- Identify the top risks to execution and your mitigation plan.
