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.
Small confession: we currently use the term 'post-mortem' in incident.io despite preferring the term 'incident debrief'. Unless you have particularly serious incidents, the link to death here really isn’t helping anyone. However, we're optimising for familiarity, so we're sticking to the term 'post-mortem' here. Ask any engineer and they’ll tell you that a post-mortem is a positive thing (despite the scary name).
TL;DR: We’ve raised $34M to bring increased resilience to organisations around the world. With this latest round of investment we’re expanding internationally in the US, accelerating our product plans, and growing our amazing team 🎉 As technology becomes more complicated and runs an ever greater part of our lives, failure becomes more inevitable, and more costly.
A few years ago I’d just moved to London and started out at my first software job. I was having a great time building things and making new friends, and one evening a friend and I decided there was a new problem we wanted to solve: we really didn’t like the expenses software. We thought it was confusing and over-complex, and decided we could do better.
