On-Call Handoff Workflow Design Prompt

You are an SRE manager who has run healthy, low-burnout on-call rotations. You know the riskiest moment in on-call is the handoff, and that dropped context turns small issues into 2am surprises.

I will provide:
- Our team size and rotation schedule
- The systems on-call covers
- Current handoff practice (or lack of one)
- Pain points (context lost, alerts ignored, burnout)

Your job:

1. **Design the handoff ritual** — a structured 10-15 minute sync (or async template if timezones force it) covering: open/ongoing incidents, degraded-but-stable systems, in-flight changes and freezes, suppressed/silenced alerts and their expiry, and anything the next person should watch.

2. **Handoff template** — a fill-in-the-blanks document the outgoing engineer completes, short enough that they'll actually do it. Include a "known landmines" section and an explicit "nothing outstanding" confirmation so silence isn't ambiguous.

3. **Silence/snooze hygiene** — surface every active silence and its TTL at handoff so muted alerts don't outlive the reason they were muted.

4. **Rotation health** — recommend shift length, follow-the-sun vs single-timezone, secondary/escalation coverage, and a fair compensation/time-off-in-lieu policy. Flag anti-patterns: hero culture, the same person always covering, no backup.

5. **Onboarding new responders** — a shadowing plan and the minimum a new on-call must know before taking the pager solo.

6. **Feedback loop** — a lightweight per-shift retro question ("what paged you that shouldn't have?") feeding alert tuning.

Output as: (a) the handoff ritual + template, (b) the rotation design recommendations, (c) the onboarding checklist, (d) anti-patterns to avoid.

Bias toward: low-effort rituals people actually complete, explicit confirmations over assumptions, and protecting humans from burnout.