March 2022 Summaries

Incident.io dedicates one day every month, called Content Day, where all employees focus solely on writing content. The company stores ideas in a database and encourages employees to write about topics they are passionate about. This practice helps the company reach more people, elevate the importance of writing, and surface diverse viewpoints. However, it also has trade-offs such as time spent away from other tasks and potential selection bias due to hiring strong communicators. Despite these challenges, Incident.io believes Content Day is a valuable cultural practice that helps them communicate effectively with their audience.

To build a strong incident response process, focus on three key aspects: defining what an incident is, keeping everyone updated, and remembering that the process isn't over until it's over. Start by creating a broad and inclusive definition of an incident to encourage its declaration without fear of repercussions. Ensure transparency in communication by making someone explicitly accountable for updates and using predictable formats. Finally, use post-mortem documents or meetings to learn from incidents and improve day-to-day operations, but avoid making the process feel painful or repetitive.

The text discusses four principles for hiring the first 50 people in an early-stage company. These principles are crucial for achieving a diverse, high-performing team that can significantly impact the company's success. The first principle emphasizes the importance of each hire and how it affects the next 10-20 hires. The second principle involves maintaining a very high bar by not compromising on key skills, behaviors, and values for exceptional hires. The third principle focuses on building an inclusive environment and prioritizing attracting diversity in the team. Lastly, the fourth principle suggests slowing down to speed up, emphasizing quality over quantity when hiring. These principles help create a cohesive team with diverse perspectives and high performance, ultimately leading to better outcomes for the company.

This guide discusses various approaches to compensating employees for being on-call, including no pay for on-call, pay as part of base salary, pay per incident, and pay by time. It also provides advice on choosing the best compensation method based on factors such as organization size, criticality of service, and frequency of incidents. The guide emphasizes fairness in compensation and suggests that paying by time is a sensible default for most organizations.

incident.io's service catalog provides a single source of truth for engineering and operations teams during incidents, documenting services, owners, dependencies, and customer impact while pulling data from trusted tools. It allows for comprehensive mapping and clear ownership, dynamic and intelligent automation, and enhanced collaboration and context. The catalog integrates with external tools such as Slack, Zoom, Datadog, Prometheus, PagerDuty, Jira, GitHub, Asana, Salesforce, and Cortex, enriching the catalog with sources, communication, monitoring, alerting, project management, CRM, and customer context. By combining clear ownership data with live information from trusted tools, incident.io's catalog speeds up troubleshooting, improves post-incident learning, and reduces manual data maintenance.

The author discusses their B2B sales stack for startups with less than 100 employees. They emphasize the importance of a CRM, such as Close, which automates emails and task management while providing good UX/UI. For inbound leads, they use Calendly and Zapier to book meetings and assign leads to relevant sales members. Outbound strategies include using Twitter for warm leads, LinkedIn for finding personas, Lusha for contact discovery, and Octopus CRM for outreach. Slack Connect is used for customer communications, while Loom is utilized for asynchronous communication with prospects. Building a community on platforms like Slack can also be beneficial for sales. The author expects the stack to evolve as their team grows.

Mari has recently joined team incident.io as the Head of Marketing to increase awareness about their tool that helps streamline incident response administration, making it less stressful for users. Before this role, she was the CMO at Dashbird where she led marketing and go-to-market efforts. In her free time, Mari enjoys traveling, browsing dog pictures on Reddit, exploring niche perfumes, and analyzing viral TikTok trends.

Incident.io has recently introduced user roles to its platform. The decision was made due to the need for permission levels in upcoming features and the launch of Private Incidents, which required certain users to have oversight without compromising privacy. A fixed set of roles with granular scopes behind the scenes were created to avoid complexity while ensuring flexibility. The frontend app was updated to be aware of these permissions, and a feature-gating rollout strategy was implemented to minimize risks.

The text introduces a new engineer joining the incident.io team. They have experience in machine learning and previously worked at Ravelin and Recycleye. Their preferences include unit tests, simple over sexy solutions, thoughtfully written infrastructure, automation tools, startup culture, and puns. They dislike the default terminal, pedestrians who don't press traffic light buttons, and referring to the pandemic as "panny D."