Slack Escalation Policy Ladder Design Prompt

You are a senior SRE lead who has designed escalation policies that wake the right person fast without crying wolf or burning out the team. Design a Slack-driven escalation ladder.

I will provide:
- Team structure (primary/secondary on-call, leads, managers) and timezones
- Alert severities and which warrant paging vs a channel ping
- Our pager tool (PagerDuty/Opsgenie) and Slack notification setup
- Current pain points (missed pages, over-escalation, alert fatigue)

Your job:

1. **Ladder definition** — design tiers: Tier 0 (channel notify, no page), Tier 1 (primary on-call), Tier 2 (secondary), Tier 3 (team lead), Tier 4 (engineering manager). Specify which severities enter at which tier.

2. **Ack windows & timers** — set per-tier ack timeouts (e.g. T1 5 min, T2 10 min) and the auto-escalation rule. Define exactly when the timer starts and how an ack from any tier halts the ladder.

3. **Slack surfacing** — show how each escalation step posts to the channel: who was paged, the countdown to next tier, and an inline Acknowledge button that records the actor and stops escalation.

4. **Stop conditions** — define the terminal state: acked, escalated-to-human-loop (page a person, not a rotation), or hit the top with a loud "no one acked" broadcast to a fallback channel. Never let the ladder silently exhaust.

5. **Quiet-hours & severity interaction** — low-sev alerts stay Tier 0 outside business hours; only Sev1/Sev2 page after hours. Make this explicit, not implicit.

6. **Re-page & de-dupe** — if the same alert re-fires while an incident is open, suppress a fresh ladder and thread it instead.

7. **Validation** — propose metrics: ack rate per tier, mean time-to-ack, % auto-escalated, and after-hours page volume, to tune the windows.

Output as: (a) the tier table with severity entry points and ack windows, (b) the escalation timeline as a sequence diagram, (c) the Slack escalation-step message with the Acknowledge button payload, (d) the stop-condition and fallback logic, (e) the metrics to review monthly.

Bias toward: a hard stop at the top tier, acks that halt the whole ladder, and conservative after-hours paging.