I joined GoCardless as a junior engineer. It was one of my first coding jobs, and in my time there I progressed to senior much faster than I had expected. When I reflect on how this happened, one pattern stands out to me; the big step changes in my understanding, and my ability to solve larger and more complex engineering problems, came as a result of incidents.

Customer trust and satisfaction are the most important currency your business can own. No matter how brilliant your product, without happy customers your business will struggle. When everything is running smoothly, it’s easy to feel that heady dose of customer love. It’s when things break during an incident that these relationships are really put to the test.

At incident.io, we empower teams to run incidents quickly and effectively from start to finish. One of the ways we help is by taking the manual admin out of your incidents. More often than not, folks are spending too much time thinking about the process, when the time would be better spent focusing on fixing. Our automated workflows, nudges and prompts help to embed best practices and unlock time for more impactful work.

We’ve had a bumper month here at incident.io HQ. We’ve welcomed 3 new joiners, celebrated two 1 year incident.io anniversaries (congrats Lisa and Lawrence!), released a whole load of exciting new features and (for those of you wondering what’s been causing the recent heatwave) we’ve redesigned our website and it is on fire 🔥 😎 Here’s a round-up of some of this month's highlights…

It’s been over 6 months since Lawrence’s excellent blog post on our data stack here at incident.io, and we thought it was about time for an update. This post runs through the tweaks we’ve made to our setup over the past 2 months and challenges we’ve found as we’ve scaled from a company of 10 people to 30, now with a 2 person data team (soon to be 3 - we’re hiring)!

I caught the tail-end of a Twitter thread the other day which centred around the use of Slack channels for incidents, and whether creating a new channel for each new incident is helpful or harmful. It turns out this is a much more evocative subject than I thought, and since I have opinions I thought I’d share them!

The Digital Finance Strategy is a European directive that aims to support and develop digital finance in Europe whilst maintaining financial stability and consumer protection. There are three main components to the package: In this blog post, we’ll attempt to summarise the 113-page DORA proposal, highlighting how it will apply to incident management at financial entities.

At incident.io, we believe that incidents are for everyone. As part of enabling that mission, we think it’s essential to ensure that all users can create, configure, and maintain business processes related to an incident. Today, we have two approaches to support different people, products, and organisational structures: We’re excited to announce that we’re taking this further and adding Zapier to our growing list of options to automate your processes (and focus on fixing)!

Interrupts are often seen as a problem that eats away at your team’s productivity, and gets in the way of shipping important things for your customers. It’s often consciously accrued from the tech debt we accept to ship features sooner. However when a team doesn’t have a good strategy for dealing with the consequences of those decisions, the pain is felt much more acutely and much sooner.

Deep into an incident, Slack firing, up to your ears in decisions, not sure where to turn next? It’s easy for external communication with your customers to fall far down the list of priorities in these moments. However, these are the exact situations where comms are vital, and where underestimating their importance can having damaging and lasting effects on your organisation.

It isn’t the first time you’ve heard us say this and it won’t be the last: getting your post-incident process right is a game-changer. Being able to run effective debriefs and create useful postmortems helps us learn from our mistakes, respond better to future incidents and identify how we can build resilience in our product and teams. In short, it’s the thing the shifts the dial from just “fixing” to actually improving.