What Chris Martin Taught Me About Incident Response (A Thread on Systems, Rollbacks, and Going Back to the Start)

We rolled back a major feature at 2:47 AM last Tuesday.

Not because we wanted to. Not because we panicked. But because sometimes—often—the bravest thing a technical leader can do is admit that the path forward is actually backward.

I was in the war room (our #incident-response Slack channel), watching metrics spike, when someone dropped a Spotify link in the thread. "The Scientist" by Coldplay. At first, I thought it was a joke. But as the opening piano notes played through my AirPods Max, something clicked.

"Nobody said it was easy / No one ever said it would be this hard"

Chris Martin wasn't singing about lost love. He was singing about production deployments.

Think about it: We spend months architecting the perfect solution. We write design docs. We run chaos engineering experiments. We do canary deploys and feature flags and staged rollouts. We believe we've thought of everything.

And then reality happens.

The database connection pool saturates. The cache invalidation strategy we workshopped for three weeks creates a thundering herd. The downstream service we trusted implicitly starts timing out under load we should have anticipated.

Nobody said it was easy. But here's what I've learned after 127 production incidents (yes, I keep count): The teams that win aren't the ones who never fail. They're the ones who know when to go back to the start.

"I'm going back to the start"

This lyric hits different at 3 AM when you're weighing options:

• Push forward with a hotfix (ETA unknown, risk high)
• Roll back to the last known good state (ETA 10 minutes, ego bruised)

The math is simple. The execution is hard. Because rolling back feels like admitting defeat.

But it's not defeat—it's systems thinking.

Rolling back is:

• Restoring customer trust
• Buying time to solve the problem correctly
• Demonstrating that uptime matters more than pride
• Teaching your team that the start is sometimes the safest place to be

The Vulnerability I'm Working Through

I used to see rollbacks as failure. Early in my career, I would fight to push through. I would add complexity to solve complexity. I would defend the deploy like it was personal.

Then I led a team through a 6-hour incident that could have been a 15-minute rollback.

The postmortem was brutal. Not because leadership was angry—because I had to own that my ego had cost us five and a half hours of downtime. That's when I learned: The start isn't a retreat. It's a foundation.

What Chris Martin Understands About Resilience

The song isn't about going backward. It's about having the courage to reset when the path forward is broken. It's about recognizing that "the start" isn't a place of failure—it's a place of clarity.

In systems architecture, we call this idempotency. In incident response, we call it rollback strategy. In life, we call it humility.

But really? It's all the same thing.

So here's my question for the technical leaders in my network: When was the last time you had the courage to go back to the start? And what did you learn when you did?

The best teams I've worked with aren't the ones who never roll back.

They're the ones who know when to hit undo.

Still shipping. Still learning. Still occasionally listening to Coldplay during incidents.

Systems over ego. Always.