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• The changing nature of linguistics and communication with AI |
• PagerDuty's plans to revamp pricing and packaging |
• Integrating Jeli insights with PagerDuty's incident cycle |
• The importance of onboarding new engineers and creating a culture of knowledge sharing within the company |
• The acquisition of Jeli by PagerDuty and the challenges that came with it, including cultural and personnel changes |
• How PagerDuty approaches incident management and prevention, focusing on learning from incidents rather than just automating solutions |
• Nora Jones' personal experience with the acquisition and her thoughts on what makes a successful transition, including the importance of founders staying involved |
• Nora's thoughts on her current role and whether she has plans to leave PagerDuty, citing her enjoyment of the challenges and opportunities at the company. |
• Background in reliability community and experience with large enterprises |
• Challenges in setting up PagerDuty to facilitate knowledge transfer and communication |
• Importance of integrating PagerDuty with other tools and systems for optimal value |
• Need for cultural change and human interaction to facilitate learning and improvement |
• Personal history and influences in developing expertise in reliability and chaos engineering |
• Availability of book on reliability and related topics |
**Jerod Santo:** Hello, and welcome to the lovely Oriental Theater in Denver, Colorado. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Jerod... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm Adam. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...and we've been doing the Changelog Podcast for a very long time, but we've never done this. So thank you for coming, this is truly a special time... And we wanted to have a special guest with us, a Denverite, and a really cool person... And luckily, we found Nora Jones. Let's hear it for Nora. |
**Nora Jones:** Thank you. |
**Jerod Santo:** Nora is the founder and CEO of Jeli, which is an incident management and learning platform. Then we had her on the show a few years back, in an episode called "Learning from Incidents." That was February, 2022. Since that time, Nora and the Jeli team have been acquired by PagerDuty, where you now work.... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Love that. |
**Jerod Santo:** And your title's really cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And long. |
**Jerod Santo:** And long. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wait for this. |
**Jerod Santo:** So I'm going to read it for us all. You're a senior director and the head of pricing and product strategy and growth. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's three jobs. |
**Nora Jones:** Yeah. Too many hats. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] So let's start with the acquisition. So tell us about Jeli... You're part of a much bigger organization now, but just briefly the Jeli journey, starting it, and then take us to the acquisition. I'm sure you could do that in 30 seconds. |
**Nora Jones:** Yeah, absolutely. So I started Jeli in 2019, and prior to that I had spent my entire career as an engineer dealing with incidents. I was working at Netflix, I worked at a company called Jet.com, which got acquired by Walmart... I worked at Slack for a bit... And I was kind of doing similar roles in each... |
So Jeli was a product that we built based on real problems I was experiencing. It was really a tool I wished I had had in some of those situations... And so that was where it was born. And I'm very, very nerdy about incidents and that topic, and reliability, and I've been a PagerDuty user my whole career... And so the ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How did you feel about the acquisition process? You said you didn't plan for it... How did it come about? Did they reach out to you? Were they fans? Were they users? |
**Nora Jones:** Yeah, no, I mean... So the first two integrations that we built for Jeli, like before we even had customers, were Slack and PagerDuty. So we were like really tightly integrated. And the integration we had with PagerDuty was getting on-call schedules. And we were using the on-call schedules to figure out... |
So I spoke at one of PagerDuty's conferences in - I think it was 2020. It was like their first remote conference... And so we had always kind of been friendly, and maintained a relationship for a few years. And then they reached out and asked if like we wanted to have more serious conversations. And so I started explor... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:12\] When you looked at that acquisition, as a founder, you think exit, right? Because that's a good thing. You built something, you want to profit from that, you want to see your work be recognized... Paydays are great, obviously. But how do you also think about the -- one thing you said in yo... |
**Nora Jones:** I mean, I don't necessarily think those are separate things, you know? Like I mentioned, I built this product because it was something I wished I had had in my jobs. And so that was really like kind of my North Star, was getting it out to everyone. And so after the acquisition, seeing the usage of somet... |
**Jerod Santo:** Does Jeli as a platform still exist as part of PagerDuty today? Is it a tab, or is it a subsection? |
**Nora Jones:** Yeah, so it's within PagerDuty. So one of the things -- so I spent the first year helping integrate the platform, helping integrate the cultures... It's very different bringing a 20-person company to a 1,200-person company. And some of these people had never worked at an organization bigger than 30 folk... |
**Jerod Santo:** Is it called Jeli? |
**Nora Jones:** What's that? |
**Jerod Santo:** Like, do they opt into Jeli, or is it called something else now? |
**Nora Jones:** It is called Jeli in the user interface. It'll probably eventually just be called post-incident reviews, but you know... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, you're in charge of product, so you can change that if you want to, right? You can keep it or change it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Just keep the name. Oh, you're saying you're in charge of product, so you can decide if that gets renamed. |
**Nora Jones:** \[laughs\] Yeah. I mean, I think at first it made sense to keep the name, but I think it evolves over time. I think if the name was something more relevant to what it did, it would probably make sense to keep it. But if someone's in their PagerDuty UI and sees the word Jeli, they're not going to know wh... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, totally. |
**Nora Jones:** As much as I would hope they do. |
**Jerod Santo:** We focus on the name, but I think it's a proxy for this handing off of a thing that you built. And the attachment as somebody who built something, that you have for a company or for a product. And the name kind of represents like an era, or the thing, right? Jeli is the thing that you built... I ask th... |
**Nora Jones:** \[11:57\] Yeah, it's integrated. There's more integration that's being worked on. It has a product manager managing it; I handed off my baby... But it felt like the right thing to do, you know? And we have a lot of plans for it too, so I'm excited to see how it evolves. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What was the response from PagerDuty customers? As you said, it became an enterprise first, and you're like "No, it needs to be for everybody." And then so you expanded to all the plans. So every PagerDuty customer has access to Jeli, whether you keep the same name or not... What was response to hav... |
**Nora Jones:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what was the response like from the existing customer base of PagerDuty having this new tool? |
**Nora Jones:** Yeah, so when we got acquired, 90% of our customers were PagerDuty's customers. And the very first customer I sold to with Jeli - giant enterprise company, which is very rare for startups... And so all of a sudden, most of the companies that were using us were large enterprise companies, which is a lot ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Ed Chambers? |
**Nora Jones:** Yeah, exactly. But yeah, and I just actually lost my train of thought. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sorry about that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Good job, Adam. |
**Nora Jones:** No, no, no. I forgot the question. |
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