November 2023 Summaries

The text discusses how incident.io's engineering team uses tools to increase productivity and speed up shipping. They have built an internal tool called "Block Kit Storybook" inspired by the Slack Block Kit design system, which helps manage their growing number of Slack modals (forms) and messages. This tool allows them to store example Block Kits, render them using Slack's official Block Kit builder, and easily share these examples with others. The team finds this approach beneficial for productivity and collaboration, especially when working on Slack interfaces.

The author shares their experience as a new Product Engineer at incident.io, emphasizing the company's focus on pace and efficiency. They attribute this to thoughtful onboarding, ownership, and simple architecture. Onboarding includes clear documentation and orientation, while ownership is instilled from the beginning by encouraging new hires to evaluate and improve existing documentation. The company uses a monolith architecture for its codebase, which simplifies local development and makes it easier for new engineers to understand the system. Despite the fast pace, the author believes that these deliberate choices contribute to their productivity and success at incident.io.

The text discusses the issue of lengthy and complex incident report forms in organizations, which can lead to delays in reporting, incomplete and inaccurate information, and underreporting of incidents. It suggests that having fewer fields in the form results in faster incident declaration times. To improve declare forms, users can hide fields when they are not needed, make some fields optional, consider eliminating non-crucial fields, or move them to a different form. Concise forms lead to happier responders and more efficient incident management.

Data teams are increasingly adopting software engineering practices and tools to improve their processes. While there are many tools for identifying errors in data pipelines, there is a lack of solutions for responding to these errors. Implementing an incident management platform can help data teams establish better processes for handling data errors and become more efficient. Automated tests and observability tools like dbt and synq can catch problems earlier, but communication and collaboration during the resolution process often rely on messaging tools like Slack or Teams. Using dedicated channels for each data incident, providing easy access to updates, assigning clear actions and owners, and tracking data incidents can help improve incident management for data teams.

Lisa Karlin Curtis, Tech Lead at incident.io, shares her insights on running effective meetings in an episode of the podcast. She emphasizes the importance of empathy in the workplace and provides actionable advice for conducting successful meetings. Drawing from her experience as a consultant at Accenture and a software engineer, Lisa highlights common mistakes people make when leading meetings, such as lack of clarity about the meeting's purpose and insufficient social capital to enforce alignment. She also discusses the importance of acknowledging human aspects in work interactions and offers tips for striking a balance between preparation and execution. Additionally, she shares her experience with calendar cleansing and how Incident approaches this trend by emphasizing structured communication, documentation, and asynchronous methods.

Incident management tools are not limited to technical issues and engineering teams, as they can also benefit non-technical departments and situations beyond just technical incidents. These tools provide a space for collaboration on various issues, including genuine or planned events, and help coordinate responses, assign tasks, and give updates. Examples of such use cases include data breaches, product launches, routine maintenance, and even load testing. By democratizing the use of incident management across an organization, companies can improve efficiency, save time, and better protect their customers.

Incident management tools, traditionally used by engineering teams to address technical issues, have broader applications across an organization, as demonstrated by platforms like incident.io. These tools can assist various departments, such as Customer Support and Risk and Compliance, in managing non-technical incidents, like data breaches or operational tasks, by providing a collaborative space for coordination and communication. The text highlights that incident management is not solely an engineering concern and can facilitate efficiency and process improvement in non-incident scenarios like product launches or routine maintenance. It emphasizes the importance of democratizing incident management across organizations, ensuring that tools are accessible and easy to use for all teams, thus enhancing overall responsiveness and operational effectiveness.

In this podcast episode, Dimitra, a product engineer at Incident.io, discusses the launch of their Status Pages product. She highlights the challenges faced during the project, such as working on an entirely new product and collaborating cross-functionally. The team relied heavily on design input and iterated constantly to improve the user experience. They also held numerous "Polish Parties" throughout the development process to gather feedback and make improvements. Overall, Dimitra believes the Status Pages project was successful, with positive adoption and valuable learnings for future projects.