
The Debrief by incident.io
In The Debrief, you'll hear conversations with engineers, product managers and founders about the ins and outs of incident response. Whether you're looking for actionable advice from folks who have been there or relatable stories, you'll find it on The Debrief.
Latest episodes

Mar 5, 2024 • 38min
Introducing incident.io On-call
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

Feb 26, 2024 • 41min
AI can help you never forget incident follow-up actions again
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

Feb 19, 2024 • 44min
Making incidents less painful with Kerim Satirli of HashiCorp & Lawrence Jones of incident.io
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

Feb 12, 2024 • 42min
How we built a "game changing" AI assistant feature
Imagine an AI assistant that could automatically surface a whole host of useful incident response data points with just a prompt. Well, you won't need to imagine for much longer. That's exactly what we built in Assistant, one of our newest features powered by AI.
In this episode, you'll hear from Charlie, the project lead for Assistant, to get a peek behind this game-changing product. You'll hear him chat about:
What went into building Assistant
What the project timelines were
What were some of the challenges the team faced
What was it like learning the ropes of prompt engineering while building out Assistant
...and a lot more
You can listen to our AI announcement episode here and our previous episode on Suggested Summaries here.
Read our blog about Assistant.

Feb 5, 2024 • 27min
Stale incident summaries? AI can fix that for you
Incident summaries are the source of truth for responders joining an incident at any point. But the reality is that with so many things happening at once—like needing to respond to the actual incident—updating these summaries as things play out can fall by the wayside. Enter, Suggested Summaries, one of our newest features powered by AI.
In this episode, you'll hear from Milly, the project lead for Suggested Summaries, to get a peek behind the curtain. You'll hear her chat about:
What went into building Suggested Summaries
What the project timelines were
What were some of the challenges the team faced
What was it like learning the ropes of prompt engineering while building out Suggested Summaries
...and a lot more
You can listen to our AI announcement episode here and our previous episode on Related Incidents here.

Jan 29, 2024 • 22min
Why we killed our Slackbot and bought incident.io with Michael Cullum of Bud Financial
For financial services companies, good incident management is absolutely critical—maybe more so than in other industries. So, for Michael Cullum and his team at Bud Financial, the choice to build an incident response tool felt right for them in the moment.
But very quickly, Michael and the team came face-to-face with the myriad limitations that come with building your own response tooling. Soon after, they would adopt incident.io to replace that internal Slackbot and save money, resources, and headaches in the end.
The end result? A total transformation of the way they managed incidents.
In this conversation, Chris Evans, CPO of incident.io, sits down with Michael to chat through this journey. Read more about Michael's buying decision: https://incident.io/customers/bud

Jan 23, 2024 • 38min
Using AI to understand incident similarity
Recently we went live with one of our biggest product launches to date AI. And this product was unique in that it was broken up into four smaller projects:
Related incidents
Suggested summaries
Suggested follow-ups
Assistant
So naturally most folks might be wondering: What were the biggest differences between these projects and what went into actually building out each of these features?
In this episode, you'll hear from Rob and Isaac, both Product Engineers who played a really critical role in the building out of related incidents, to get a peek behind the curtain.
You'll hear them chat about:
What went into building related incidents
What their project timelines were
What were some of the challenges they faced
What was it like learning the ropes of prompt engineering while building out related incidents
...and a lot more
As an aside, if you want to learn more about each of these features, we're releasing four mini-episodes diving into each of them.

Jan 17, 2024 • 30min
incident.io, say hello to AI
This week was a particularly exciting one for us at incident.io. We launched not one, not two, but four AI-powered features to help folks get the most out of their incidents.
Assistant
Suggested summaries
Suggested follow-ups
Related incidents
In this episode of The Debrief, we sit down with Ed Dean, Product Analyst, and Charlie Revett, Product Engineer, to talk through all of these features and explain how they're already making an impact. We discuss:
How we made sure to balance autonomy with AI
Why we decided to build these features and why now
What it was like working with design partners throughout this process
What it was like learning prompt engineering while simultaneously building a product rooted in the practice
...and much more
You can learn more about our AI features here: https://incident.io/ai

Dec 18, 2023 • 40min
A year in review—2023 at incident.io
What a year 2023 was at incident.io! While it's hard to summarize 365 days, a few things stand out:
We launched a bunch of new products like Catalog and Status Pages.
We hired a ton and we're now sitting at nearly 80 employees as of December 2023.
We expanded into the U S opening up a brand new office just a few weeks ago.
...and there's still so much more ahead of us
So as we close the curtain on 2023, we sat down with the three co-founders of incident.io to do a bit of reflection on the wild ride that was this year.
In this episode you'll hear them discuss challenges, big wins, moments of growth, what's next for us, and most importantly, what the three co-founders like most about one another.
Read our year-end blog post here: https://incident.io/blog/reflecting-on-a-momentous-2023

Dec 12, 2023 • 26min
Incident management for data teams
If you're on a data team, have you ever considered using an incident management tool to respond to pipeline issues? If the answer is no, then you might want to check out this episode.
Here, we chat with Jack, Data Analyst at incident.io, to better understand why data teams can—and should—look to incident management tools like incident.io to manage issues. We chat about:
Why there's a big push for data teams to adopt the practices of engineering teams—from tools to processes
Why incident management tools aren't just for engineers
How an incident management tool like incident.io can transform the way you respond to things like pipeline issues
...and much more
Read Jack's blog post about incident management for data teams here: https://incident.io/blog/incident-management-for-data-teams