# Behind the Flame: Nicole Hussein *July 30, 2026* Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidentios. Meet [Nicole Hussein](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-hussein-258a86275/), Product Engineer here at incident.io. #### **Q: What is it like being a Product Engineer at incident.io?** There's never a quiet moment, one moment you'll be in meetings, working on a product spec or tech scope. Next you'll be focused on implementation, or talking to customers. It's all sorts. It's not just sitting and writing code. #### **Q: What is something you are excited or proud to have worked on?** I recently worked on customising alert messages in the chat platform. Customers had historically been quite annoyed about this, saying the messages were ugly and not telling them what they needed to know. So we built something that lets you create templates based on where the alert comes from, with different information relevant to each source. You can add emojis, link to specific things, make it your own. Customers can now see at a glance exactly what they need to act on. #### **Q: What are you most looking forward to with incident.io this year and beyond?** On-call is about 2 years old now and is relatively still a new product. When I joined, we were still establishing the foundations, making sure the reliability was as good as it could be. Now those foundations are solid and people have real trust in it. It feels like there's so much more opportunity to work on differentiating, exciting, magical features. How can we make on-call really special? What can we do that no one has thought to do yet, beyond basic paging? #### **Q: What does collaboration look like on your team?** Even though we're technically individual contributors, you're never working solely on your own. Usually you're on a project with someone else, or there's someone who worked on a feature a year and a half ago who has all the context you need. And because we're mostly in the office together, it's easy, you can just tap someone on the shoulder. Beyond the Engineering team, there's also a lot of collaboration with Technical Support Engineers when we're doing reactive work on Product responder, and with Go-to-Market when I want to understand how customers actually use a feature. I've gone and asked, 'What do people complain about? What's missing?' That kind of thing is really useful. #### **Q: What was something that surprised you when you joined?** The lack of surprise, honestly. When you're interviewing, you're trying to glean as much as you can about a company from the people and from what you can find online. But there are always some things that don't come through. What surprised me after I joined was that it was basically exactly as they'd described. Very transparent about the pace, the way we work, what people care about, the values. Everything was so aligned with what I'd heard in the interview process, which is actually quite rare. #### **Q: What is the value that most resonates with you?** _Make it Magic_,I love adding a little polish, a little extra detail. A good example is the alert templates: the fact that you can assign an emoji to an attribute is not a necessary feature, but it's the cherry on top that gives people a little smile when they notice it. The baseline is doing the feature well. #### **Q: Has there ever been a customer story that genuinely made you proud of what incident.io does?** The most positive reactions I've had from customers have been for the smallest things. A uni friend of mine is a customer, and she messaged me on WhatsApp to share something that had been reposted in her company Slack. She said: 'Thank you for bringing colour to our dull, sad support lives.' I thought she was being sarcastic at first. She wasn't. It was a really small thing on my end, but it made a real difference for her. That kind of reaction is what it's all about. #### **Q: What's a perk or benefit you didn't expect to love but actually do?** I knew I was going to love First Friday, so that doesn't count. ClassPass has been a nice surprise though. It's a small perk, but it's just enough of an incentive to do something you might do anyway. #### **Q: What's something you've learned since joining?** My attitude towards things going wrong. I get anxious because I want to do things right and I don't want to let people down. But that anxiety can hold you back, and I've really learned that here. The fact that incident.io describes even small things as incidents means it starts to feel lower stakes. You go through the process for things that aren't a big deal, which makes it easier when things really are a big deal. If you're never stuck going through it alone, being transparent about it, staying focused, that's all you can do, it will be okay. #### **Q: What would your former self be most surprised to know about your job now?** I think I'd be most surprised by how many different things I've worked on. I've been exposed to so much, including Android development, which I'd never done before. Also the amount of direct customer interaction, I was told during the interview process that there's more customer contact than you'd expect in an Engineering role, but I still wasn't fully anticipating that I'd be directly replying to customers in Slack channels. #### **Q: What made you say yes to incident.io?** Good vibes during the interview process, and feeling like I was being valued and told everything upfront. It felt very authentic. Authenticity and transparency are things I care about a lot, and that really came through. Everyone was real about the good parts of the job and the hard parts of the job, and still clearly wanted to be there. That made me want to work with people who have that attitude. #### **Q: What advice would you give to candidates interviewing with us?** Be authentic. Don't try to present yourself in a certain light. Just go with what you actually think and be yourself, because that's what everyone here does.