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Roles name the jobs your team does during an incident, so responders know who’s coordinating the response, who’s handling communications, and who to turn to for help. Assign them as soon as an incident gets going, and reassign them as people hand over. This page covers assigning roles during a live incident. To create roles, write their descriptions, or scope them to particular incident types, see Incident roles. How you assign roles depends on whether you run incidents in Slack or Microsoft Teams. The dashboard works the same way for both.

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Assigning roles yourself

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From the roles modal

Type /inc roles in the incident channel to see every role on the incident and who currently holds it.

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In a single command

Type /inc role [role] [@user] to assign someone without opening the modal. For example, /inc role lead @bea makes Bea the Lead.The role part is the role’s Slack reference, a lowercase shorthand set when the role is created.

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From the dashboard

Open the incident and select Assign next to a role, or the edit icon on the Roles section to set several at once.

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What happens when you assign a role

We post the change in the incident channel, so everyone following along sees who picked it up.
The incident’s announcement post updates to show the current roles.An announcement post in a Slack channel, with Incident Lead, Communication Lead and Reporter highlightedIf the role has instructions, we send them to the new assignee as a message in the channel that only they can see, so they know what’s expected of them without anyone having to explain it.A private Slack message telling the new Communications Lead what is expected of them

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Assigning roles automatically

You don’t have to assign roles by hand. Workflows can fill them the moment an incident is declared, including putting whoever’s currently on call into a role, so the right people are in place before anyone thinks to look. See Incident roles for the common patterns.

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FAQs

Assigning a role needs permission to update role assignments, which your team controls under User roles and permissions. You can also limit who’s eligible to hold a particular role on a particular incident type, for example requiring that only your security team can lead a security incident. See Role restrictions.
The drop-down shows a selection of incident.io users rather than everyone, so start typing a name to find someone who isn’t listed. If they still don’t appear, they may never have been invited to incident.io. See Why can’t I see all my team in the drop-down of incident roles?.
Yes. Each role has a description, shown wherever someone’s assigning roles, and instructions sent to whoever picks the role up. Edit both from Settings → Incident roles, or read more in Incident roles.
No. The Reporter records whoever declared the incident, so it’s set automatically and stays put. Every other role can be reassigned as often as you need.