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.

This is on-call as it should be. The secret's out. The world can finally know. incident.io On-call is here. Naturally, a lot of you may be wondering: why and why now. So to help answer those questions, we sat down with Chris and Pete, two of our co-founders here at incident.io to get a bit of background on this project: What exactly went into it? What were we hoping to solve for? How are we addressing the pain points around being on call? And most importantly, how are we stacking up against the incumbents in our space? This episode will not only get you excited about this huge week, it'll get you pumped for what's ahead for on-call. Learn more about on-call here: https://incident.io/oncall

Noting follow-up actions is really important at the end of the incident response process. The problem is that it can be really easy to overlook certain actions or forget to do them entirely. With Suggested Follow-ups, this is now a thing of the past. In this episode, you'll hear from Rob, the project lead for our latest Suggested Follow-ups feature, to get a peek behind the curtain. You'll hear him chat about: What went into building Suggested Follow-ups What the project timelines were What were some of the challenges the team faced ...and a lot more You can listen to our ⁠AI announcement episode here⁠. Here are the rest of our AI episodes: Related Incidents Suggested Summaries Assistant

For a lot of teams, incident management can be a bit of a headache. It's stressful. It's not optimized. The whole process can feel like it's being held together with tape. Worst of all? Responders are the ones feeling the brunt of it. But in reality, your customers are, too. Think about it: Incidents are running longer than they should Follow-up actions to prevent similar incidents in the future aren't being followed through with Learning from incidents doesn't happen at all due to the lack of documentation ..and the list does go on and on But honestly, the situation doesn't even have to be so dire. Things can be, generally speaking, totally fine. But you recognize that there are some things that you can do to make incident response really shine at your organization. So if you're finding yourself looking for a better way, we've got you covered. In this episode, you'll hear from two folks who have years of combined experience responding to incidents: Kerim, a Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, and Lawrence, a Product Engineer here at incident.io. The topic of our conversation? How to make incidents less painful. They discuss: The first incident they experienced that made them realize the value of a good incident response process Why teams aren't prioritizing incident response What the value of responding to incidents is What a good incident response process looks like ...and more