The Debrief by incident.io

It’s fair to say that AI is here to stay.  So, as companies grapple with this reality, they’re putting their best foot forward to build AI features that really make a difference for their customers. But should you be building these features if there’s no obvious fit in your product? And even if there is, are you making sure to stay true to your product principles?  The reality is that deciding to build AI into your product isn’t a decision you make on a whim. There are tons of considerations around how to do it right—many of which we wrestled with ourselves when we were building our AI features just a few months ago.  So, in this episode of The Debrief, we sat down with our CTO, Pete Hamilton, and Product Manager, Ed Dean, to get some perspective on how we weighed the decision to build with AI and how we thought about principles along the way.

It’s no secret that teamwork is one of those things that, when done right, can make a world of a difference.  So sometimes, when responding to a particularly complicated incident, it can be best to bring a team together to figure out what’s going on and work towards a fix.  But it’s not enough to just jam a bunch of folks into a room and hope for the best. You need a framework in place to ensure that everyone stays focused, diagnoses the issue and resolves it as quickly as possible.  And for SRE, Dan Slimmon, clinical troubleshooting is just the framework to help with this.  In this episode, we chat with Dan about this approach to collaboration and why, he thinks, it can help teams resolve issues much faster.  In our conversation we discuss what the benefits of clinical troubleshooting are, why teams get tripped up on collaboration in the first place, what firefighting and incident response have in common and a lot more. 

Whether you’re a seasoned vet when it comes to incident response, or just getting started out, it can be easy to fall into the trap of doing too much all at once. And it just makes sense. Incident response is one of those things that doesn’t have a single, perfect formula, so teams can be left doing a little bit of everything in an effort to get it right.  That said there are some fundamentals that, regardless of how mature your organization is, can be a great launching off point to better incident response. And that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about in today’s episode of the Debrief.  This time around, we’re joined by Viktor Stanchev of Anchorage Digital, to chat about actionable advice for responding to incidents—from declaration to post-mortem. We cover what having a good incident response even means, why it’s important to declare incidents early, how to better communicate during incidents and a whole lot more.  If you’ve been looking for practical advice for running incidents from a veteran in the space, you’re in the right place. 

In last week’s episode of The Debrief, we had on Colette Alexander, Director of Engineering at HashiCorp, to discuss some of the myths around incident response. In that conversation, one of the myths we spoke about was the idea that asking “why” is better than asking “how.” And how, in reality, asking "how" allows you to focus more on the contributing factors that led to an incident happening, whereas “why” tends to single out a person, which can lead to a lot of blame.  For this episode, we’re diving a bit deeper into the reasons “how” is not only better for learning, it’s also better for the psychological safety of your team.  This time around, we’re joined by Dennis Henry who currently works on the Architecture team at Okta. Dennis is a big believer in psychological safety and learning from incidents, so he’s just the person to shed light on this fascinating topic. 

What if we told you that everything you thought you knew about incident response was wrong. Well, at least some of it.  That some of the things you’ve been doing for years might not actually be having the impact you thought they did. Or, even worse, that some of the assumptions you’ve been making have actually been having a negative impact on you, your team and your organization.  This week, we’re talking about myths around incident response. And who better to dispel some of these myths than Director of Engineering at HashiCorp, Colette Alexander.  We chat about myths around learning and process, why “why” is the wrong question to be asking after incidents, and why documenting risk doesn’t necessarily help you manage them. 

Discussing the importance of a strong engineering culture for companies, focusing on attracting top talent, diversity, and empowerment. Insights from Lisa, Tech Lead, and Alicia, Engineering Manager, on shaping culture, fostering collaboration, and embracing change. Emphasizing the value of customer-centric cultures and building strong relationships.

Q1 2024 is officially behind us. So we figured that it was a great time for a bit of reflection on the exciting start to the year. In this episode, we sit down with our founders, Stephen, Chris, and Pete, to get a bit of perspective on how the last three months played out. We chat about On-call, our AI launch, and the hundreds of other features, bug fixes, and bits of polish and delight that we've shipped over the last 12 weeks. We also chat about the state of the company as a whole, our growth, and ultimately what's on the horizon.

Today, good incident communication isn't a nice to have—it's an absolute must. But where do you even start? To help answer that question, we sat down with the VP of Engineering at SumUp, Adrián Moreno Peña, to get his perspective on how organizations of all sizes can share stellar comms no matter the situation. We discuss: What it means to communicate during incidents Why Status Pages are critical in helping to build trust How you can have good comms even without a lead ...and much more

Recently, we introduced our very first VP of Engineering, Norberto Lopes, to incident.io. As with all of our new joiners, we thought it would be helpful for folks to get acquainted with who exactly he is! So in this episode of The Debrief, we'll do exactly that. We sat down with Norberto to ask about his background, what he was doing before incident.io, what motivated him to join the company, and a whole lot more. If you wanted an opportunity to get to know our VP of Engineering a bit more behind the scenes, then this is the episode for you. Read Norberto's blog post explaining why he joined incident.io: https://incident.io/blog/why-i-joined-incident-io

Today, incident management is a core part of organizations, both big and small. But what if you don't have an established incident management program, where do you start? Or what if you already have a program, but you're looking to optimize it a bit? Where do you start in that case? Consider another situation: What if you're an established organization with years of incident management experience—what are some things that you can do to take things to the next level? To talk through all of these scenarios and more, we sat down with Jeff Forde, Architect on the Platform Engineering team at Collectors. Jeff has been a part of organizations at each of these phases, playing a key role in developing the incident management programs those organizations have today. If you're looking for actionable advice on how to level up your incident management, then this is the episode for you.