The Debrief by incident.io incident.io

In last week’s episode of The Debrief, we had on Colette Alexander, Director of Engineering at HashiCorp, to discuss some of the myths around incident response.

In that conversation, one of the myths we spoke about was the idea that asking “why” is better than asking “how.” And how, in reality, asking "how" allows you to focus more on the contributing factors that led to an incident happening, whereas “why” tends to single out a person, which can lead to a lot of blame. 

For this episode, we’re diving a bit deeper into the reasons “how” is not only better for learning, it’s also better for the psychological safety of your team. 

This time around, we’re joined by Dennis Henry who currently works on the Architecture team at Okta. Dennis is a big believer in psychological safety and learning from incidents, so he’s just the person to shed light on this fascinating topic. 

What if we told you that everything you thought you knew about incident response was wrong.

Well, at least some of it. 

That some of the things you’ve been doing for years might not actually be having the impact you thought they did. Or, even worse, that some of the assumptions you’ve been making have actually been having a negative impact on you, your team and your organization. 

This week, we’re talking about myths around incident response. And who better to dispel some of these myths than Director of Engineering at HashiCorp, Colette Alexander. 

We chat about myths around learning and process, why “why” is the wrong question to be asking after incidents, and why documenting risk doesn’t necessarily help you manage them. 

Whether you’re a seasoned company with 10+ years of operations, or a startup that’s just getting off the ground, making sure you have a good culture of engineering is really important. 

Not only will this have a significant impact on the folks on your team, it’ll make a big difference with hiring.

When everyone knows that your company is the place to be when it comes to culture, attracting really good talent becomes that much easier. 

But I was curious, what do some of the folks at incident.io think about engineering culture in general and how to best build it? Better yet, what about the engineering culture at incident.io? What’s it like?

To answer all of these questions and more, I sat down with Lisa Karlin Curtis, Tech Lead, and Alicia Collymore, Engineering Manager, to get their perspectives on this incredibly important topic.

We chat about what “culture” even means, why diversity is important, how teams can make sure their engineers feel empowered to share their perspectives and a whole lot more.

Q1 2024 is officially behind us.

So we figured that it was a great time for a bit of reflection on the exciting start to the year. In this episode, we sit down with our founders, Stephen, Chris, and Pete, to get a bit of perspective on how the last three months played out.

We chat about On-call, our AI launch, and the hundreds of other features, bug fixes, and bits of polish and delight that we've shipped over the last 12 weeks.

We also chat about the state of the company as a whole, our growth, and ultimately what's on the horizon.

Today, good incident communication isn't a nice to have—it's an absolute must.

But where do you even start? To help answer that question, we sat down with the VP of Engineering at SumUp, Adrián Moreno Peña, to get his perspective on how organizations of all sizes can share stellar comms no matter the situation. We discuss:


What it means to communicate during incidents
Why Status Pages are critical in helping to build trust
How you can have good comms even without a lead
...and much more

Recently, we introduced our very first VP of Engineering, Norberto Lopes, to incident.io. As with all of our new joiners, we thought it would be helpful for folks to get acquainted with who exactly he is!

So in this episode of The Debrief, we'll do exactly that.

We sat down with Norberto to ask about his background, what he was doing before incident.io, what motivated him to join the company, and a whole lot more.

If you wanted an opportunity to get to know our VP of Engineering a bit more behind the scenes, then this is the episode for you.

Read Norberto's blog post explaining why he joined incident.io: https://incident.io/blog/why-i-joined-incident-io