Learning by Design

Joining PagerDuty in 2014, the author witnessed the company's evolution from a successful startup focused on IT alerting into a comprehensive digital operations platform. This transformation was driven by the founders' initial empathy, having firsthand experience with the challenges on-call engineers face, and the company's commitment to continuous learning and adaptation. Early on, the team realized that merely relying on existing knowledge and feature requests was insufficient for understanding user needs, prompting them to conduct extensive user research across various industries. This research revealed that the existing PagerDuty framework could not adequately address the complexities of incident response, leading to a fundamental overhaul of the system without disrupting existing users. The author highlights the significant collaborative efforts across various departments to align the platform with real-world needs, ultimately allowing PagerDuty to model customer services and incidents more effectively while maintaining its core functionality. The sense of impact and collaboration at PagerDuty is emphasized as a key motivator for the author, who invites others to contribute to the ongoing evolution of the company's vision.