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**Gerhard Lazu:** So I'll go straight to the point... Why Incident.io is important to others - why is it important to others? How does it help others? |
**Chris Evans:** \[04:01\] So what we're building at Incident.io is the very best way for whole organizations to get involved in incident response. And I guess the context for why we think that's important is -- the world has massively moved on in the last few years; probably more than that. But essentially, organizati... |
So when you look at all those sorts of things rolled up together, the demand when things do go wrong are really high on people dealing with incidents... Whether that's engineers who have to fix things, or whether it's customer support people who have to get information to customers incredibly quickly and sort of have f... |
Or at the other end of the spectrum you might get some leading companies who then try and write their own tooling to encapsulate that process a little bit. And fundamentally, we feel that shouldn't be the case. People should be building this sort of thing themselves; you wouldn't go out if you're starting your company ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like your tagline, which is right on the homepage... "Playing the leading role, not all the roles." That is a very interesting one. Can you expand a little bit? And we can compare what I understand and what you've meant by it. |
**Stephen Whitworth:** Yeah, absolutely. So when stuff goes wrong in technology organizations, and it goes wrong fairly frequently - you get paged by PagerDuty or Opsgenie, and then you sort of get dropped into this white space where you need to define a process. And what often happens there is that, I guess, you're fl... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[07:58\] Yeah. I think that's really powerful, and I'm wondering, from that perspective, what does the ideal incident workflow look like to you? Because a lot of these principles and a lot of these flows that you're capturing are based on a lot of experience that you share, the founders. So you've se... |
**Chris Evans:** I think that's a really pertinent question, and I think the answer is somewhat "It depends." Our view is that there's a set of core defaults that we think every company should follow. So we want to kind of encapsulate those in the product. But equally, every single company is different, so there's thin... |
But if we look at the core of what good incident response looks like, it looks like keeping context all in one place, it looks like having very clear roles to be able to define who should be doing what, it looks like having a structured way to be able to coordinate your response... So everyone should know exactly who's... |
We see this a lot, where you jump on Twitter and you're having an issue with something, and you sort of tweet whoever that is, and they come back and go "No, everything is fine" and their status page says the same, and 30 minutes later finally the information will come out. And all those kinds of things are just painfu... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like that answer. The reason why I like it is because you mentioned the guiding principles which are essential to good incident management... Less the flow, because it depends, and I know people don't like hearing that, that it really depends. So as long as we agree on the principles, we know... |
**Stephen Whitworth:** Yeah. We think about this a lot internally, and we like to think about this as sort of a scale from JIRA on one end, as a relatively unopinionated piece of software that you can stitch together into an incredibly powerful thing, \[unintelligible 00:10:46.17\] know how to do it... And a tool calle... |
Think of it much like a program that you'd build. You'd build your core abstractions, and then when you want to have end consumers, you give them a much smaller, more focused API surface that they can really just go and interact with the product in the right way. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[11:56\] I really like that. And to come back to connect, to playing the leading role, not all the roles - what it meant to me is that you have experience in how these things happen, and you have years of experience dealing with incidents at the banks... And that's important. When it's about people's... |
One of the things I really liked, and I liked many things, but this is one that really stands out... It's when there is an incident, you can choose every 30 minutes to be notified to give an update. It's such a simple thing, but so important to keep people in the loop constantly, and you yourself to be reminded by the ... |
So I think that we get it, I think that I get it. When I say "we", Changelog.com... Does that qualify, our logo, for your homepage? What do you think? |
**Chris Evans:** A hundred percent. |
**Stephen Whitworth:** I think we can make that happen. |
**Chris Evans:** Yeah. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Thank you. \[laughs\] Good. I like that. |
**Chris Evans:** Is this whole podcast recording just an elaborate way to get your logo on our homepage? Is that what it is? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's exactly what it is. That's the only reason why we're doing this, Chris. You got it! |
**Chris Evans:** It's done now, we can wrap it up. Cheers, Gerhard. |
**Break:** \[13:52\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Can you describe for us the context in which the Incident.io started? The idea, the team... How did it all began? |
**Chris Evans:** If we wind the clock back a few years now in fact, actually, I'd just joined Monzo. I was running their platform team at the time. And as part of that, I was just \[unintelligible 00:15:15.07\] with picking up responsibility over the on-call function at Monzo. So this is like the engineers that get cal... |
And when I picked it up, basically there were a bunch of relatively unhappy engineers who everytime they got paged were jumping into this one shared Slack channel, trying to navigate a pretty complex application. Banks are very, very complicated... And as a result of all those things, they were really struggling to get... |
\[15:46\] So I ended up building the most basic solution to try and make that process a little bit easier. The things that we were trying to solve were allow an engineer who has been paged into an incident to sort of take a little bit off their plate by creating a Slack channel automatically and pinging someone in cust... |
And then from that point onwards, it just became something that Monzo just continued to build on. And so over the time that I was there, it then became more of an application, and it sort of grew and grew, and then we eventually started speaking about it publicly, and then it led to us open sourcing it. |
So I think all of that sort of culminated in Monzo having this tool that the entire organization started using, not just engineers. It was -- people in customer operations were declaring incidents through this tooling, and people in money, when stuff went wrong there, were doing it... So yeah, it just became something ... |
So yeah, that was really what led to us coming up with the idea, it became something we worked on evenings and weekends... Monzo were great at supporting us doing that as well... And yeah, it sort of developed from there and just snowballed into this product that we have today. |
**Stephen Whitworth:** Yeah, and I think the background for it starts, for me, at least when I co-founded a company back in 2015 called Ravelin... So we built credit card fraud detection software. We would be in the synchronous payment flow for apps like Deliveroo and Just Eat. So whenever there was an incident, it was... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. The one thing which I've seen in Incident specifically and that attracted me to it is the simplicity, which to me, it speaks of iterations that had to happen for the idea to get to the point which it did. So seeing Incident in the first phases - I'm not sure that it's opened up yet; like, you ca... |
So what you've just told me explains why... It explains that you have been solving this problem in different capacities, in a different context, and now you're bringing it to the masses. It gets really simple. And based on what I've seen - again, I don't wanna spoil it for others, but I really liked it. It was great. S... |
**Chris Evans:** \[20:26\] Yeah. That simplicity isn't an accident either. That's very much an active product choice on our part. So something that we want to be true always is that you can install Incident.io into your Slack workspace and you can basically get going and start creating incidents with very little onboar... |
So you're juts in a channel; it's not like a new product experience everyone's got to learn. You're in a channel, and what we try to encourage is a learning by doing type of approach to using the product. So rather than someone having to figure out everything all in one go, you'll see someone create an action inside of... |
I think you sort of start there, you start with like a Slack with benefits, and the product then layers things on top of that. So when you get to the point where you go "Do you know what? Our organization has grown, we have some complexity we need to navigate in incidents, so if I set a sev1 type incident, I want to cr... |
**Stephen Whitworth:** I think fundamentally we have an advantage, because we are building a product that we wanted to use when things were going wrong... I've seen a lot of people's startups where they're kind of searching for a problem and a pain point, and I think that that is a decent way to find it, but I think we... |
Obviously, our customers are telling us what doesn't exist and what they want us to add, but I think we have a decent nose for what's painful as well. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm really glad that you've mentioned that, Stephen... And now what I'm wondering is how does Incident.io use Incident.io? What does that look like? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** That's like Inception, isn't' it? Turtles all the way down. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. |
**Stephen Whitworth:** So we use it in a few different ways. Incidents is a kind of fuzzy concept to people. For some people, an incident is like the building is burning down, for example. It's a terrible thing, and it happens once every six months. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Hopefully not... That's terrible. A building is burning down every six months... No, thank you. \[laughs\] What kind of a building is that? That's what I wanna know... |
**Stephen Whitworth:** That was a stupid thing to say... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That was too funny... \[laughs\] Go on. |
**Stephen Whitworth:** \[23:42\] So fundamentally, we have a different view. An incident is really just some kind of interruption that takes you away from what you were currently working on, because it demands a level of urgency for you to respond. So that might look like a particularly severe bug, it might look like a... |
So we have a functionality in Incident.io where if you pin something on Slack, or emoji-react with a specific emoji, that will get added to your incident timeline. So what you're doing is you're sort of diving into things, and when you find a particular point that is high signal or very useful for understanding what's ... |
So a few different ways... I think, Chris, you will also give a nice answer, that doesn't include a building burning down every six months... \[laughter\] |
**Chris Evans:** Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I think using Incident.io incidents for low, low severity things has many benefits. It has the benefit of you just leaving a really, really good trail, so someone else who can come along and first of all see what you've done, if you've reached a solution a... |
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