Ex-Google SRE here with experience in multiple revenue-critical war rooms. At Google, war rooms were particularly useful because saying, "X is in a war room" (a

Ex-Google SRE here with experience in multiple revenue-critical war rooms. At Google, war rooms were particularly useful because saying, "X is in a war room" (at least as late as 2017) gave X the credibility to say no to everything else. Having technically competent leaders made the experience enjoyable—because they weren’t just there to demand updates but actively contributed by writing queries, and nudging the team in the right direction by asking series of right questions. My worst experience with crisis management was with one particular team at another big tech company, where the leaders were ignorant about the technology—completely clueless about the service and its architecture. In cases like this, the issue becomes a binary 0/1 problem: the service is either broken (0) or running smoothly (1). When a leader lacks the technical knowledge to grasp the intermediate steps, their only contribution is yelling for updates—and that’s exactly what they did. Bottom line: War rooms can be a space for deep work with good leadership (a combination of technical soundness and co-ordination skills under pressure). But they can quickly turn into hell when leadership lacks one of these two essential qualities—and resorts to yelling to cover their asses.