Behind the Flame: Herbert

Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidentios.

Meet Herbert Gutierrez, a Technical Support Engineer here at incident.io.

Q: What has been your favorite memory so far?

When I joined I went to London to meet the team. The company social that week was a scavenger hunt, and I basically got a speedy guided tour of London within two hours. I saw everything I wanted to see, even if it was just a couple of minutes for each landmark. We rode around on e-bikes, looking around for the random stuff on our list.

Q: What is the value that resonates with you the most?

Make it magic. Being in a customer-facing role, you get to experience a lot of the stuff that customers go through on a day-to-day basis. I'm based in California, and one of the things that we want to do is make it seem like the engineering team is out here with me. So, if customers run into blockers or anything like that, my role is to make sure they don't have to wait until the following day to get a solution to their question or issue. We make it magic for a customer to find solutions for them on the spot.

Q: What is your favorite benefit?

My favorite benefit is last Friday of the month. My fiancée works in the school system, so she has summers off. This means on those Fridays we can go and explore or do something that we wouldn't have done previously. We really take that advantage to be able to just go do what we want.

Q: What's your favorite Slack channel?

It has to be #travels. It’s a channel where the team shares photos and advice for places they’ve recently traveled to. The London team have Europe on their doorstep and I’m yet to explore much of it, so it’s great to hear their recommendations. It was easy to drop a question in there when I was heading to Spain to gather ideas.

Q: What is one piece of advice you would give yourself on your first day?

One piece of advice I'd give myself on the first day would be: relax. Everybody gets nervous, everybody gets overwhelmed. There's a lot of information that's thrown at you in the first week. Feeling like you're overwhelmed after the first couple of days of being here is very normal, we move at a very fast pace. As long as you're willing to put in the time and the effort, you'll do great.

Q: What advice would you give to any candidates interviewing with us?

Something I did when I was interviewing is I took about 15 to 20 minutes for myself before the interview. Take time to calm yourself down, to calm your nerves, it really does make a huge difference when you're walking into an interview in a calm state. Taking a short walk can help give you a clear mental state.

Q: How would you describe the culture in three words?

I'm gonna go to one of our values, it’s three words and describes our culture perfectly: make it magic. Whether it's something internally or externally, everything and everyone in the company is all about making it magic and seamless.

Q: Who would you want to be stuck in an elevator with?

[Product Engineer] Sam Starling. When I first joined he was one of the first engineers to reach out and while I was in London visiting, he was on Product Responder, so I really got to bond with him, he's such a great engineer.

Q: What does last Friday of the month mean to you?

Last Friday of the month means I am encouraged to take a little bit of an extra break in the form of a long weekend. It helps you de-stress. Talking to customers every single day is lovely, but you can get overwhelmed. Also, it's an extra 12 days of leave a year!

Q: What are you most looking forward to with the future of incident.io?

I'm mostly looking forward to the future of us going public. I truly believe in this company and the use case and the product, the team…everything about it since I joined was one of those environments that I was like, ‘I want to be here for the long run and I want to be here when we go public’.

Q: What is something you're really proud to have worked on?

I'm very proud to have worked on our support process. When I joined incident.io, we didn't really have a support team, the work was split between multiple people all with different roles. We had Customer Success, Engineers and managers all doing it. Upon joining, we started working on an actual process of support and getting it to where we are now, where it's a lot more automated. We have a lot more structures in place, to make sure customers have things resolved quickly. We have gone from handling 10 requests a day to about 70 requests. We will have to continue to review and revamp this as we scale.

Q: How do you collaborate with different departments and teams?

So as a Technical Support Engineer, my role is to bring visibility to what our customers are seeing, and loop back with the feedback to our Product team. This can be anything from a bug they encounter, a feature request, or something around product knowledge. It’s all about getting a quick turnaround for the customer. With Sales, I'm constantly jumping on calls with them for technical use cases and to showcase knowledge of our product. Additionally with Customer Success, when customers are onboarding, they sometimes need more of a technical walkthrough–that’s where I come in, especially with elements like Catalog that can be quite complex. Being looped into onboarding calls with customers is great because I’ll likely be the one talking to them on a daily basis. Overall I collaborate with a lot of different teams because my role revolves so much around talking to customers and helping to unblock them on technical issues.

Q: What is your favorite customer interaction?

My favorite customer interaction was when I was about two or three weeks in, and we had a customer telling us everything about why they absolutely loved us–because all of our customers love us! They were going on and on about how much they loved the product, how much they loved our support, how much they loved all the team and the effort that we put into taking care of our customers. For me it really put the nail in the coffin that this is the company that I want to be a part of; it made me realize something truly special about incident.io.

Q: If you were to join another team for a day, what team would you join and why?

The team that I would want to join for a day would be Design. They do such a good job designing our product, it's so intuitive with everything that they do and I would love to get a behind the scenes peek of everything.

Q: How can you see your role developing and growing?

I see the Technical Support Engineer role evolving to the point where we're more involved in the deploying of fixes and code changes. Right now, given that we're a very small team, (just two of us!) it's kind of impossible. We're currently very involved in the typical day-to-day of technical support, but once we have a larger team, it’s something I’m excited to see evolve.

Q: Why do you think companies need a reliable incident management tool?

Companies need a reliable incident management process tool because it makes a huge difference when you're able to solve your issues within a couple of seconds or minutes versus a couple of hours. Being able to get the services up and running as fast as possible is huge. Not only that, but also bringing visibility to the entire company. Working as a Technical Support Engineer, in the past I’ve seen multiple incidents where I’ve had to look through an infinite amount of channels to try to find context. Taking inbound customer requests and trying to understand what is happening could sometimes be very intimidating. That’s where incident management and visibility is key. Bringing visibility to the rest of the company, to your customers, in a fast and efficient way is a game changer.

Q: How would you describe the day-to-day of your job?

The first three hours consist of communicating a lot with the team because I only have about two to three hours in the morning crossover, given I'm in California and they're in London. I like to do a lot of my follow-ups and collaborate when possible. After that, it falls into mostly just remote work that I have to do here, from jumping on a lot of customer calls, to working on all my projects. Finally, I interact with our Sales as it’s heavily US-centric as well, which is great.