Behind the Flame: Rory

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

Meet Rory Bain, a Product Engineer on the On-call team here at incident.io.

Q: What is your favorite incident.io memory so far?

I think my favorite incident.io experience so far has been our company all-hands. I presented not long after I joined, where I thought it would be fun to use a random inspirational quote generator to show off a new feature I'd built. I didn’t know that the inspirational quote generator was highly offensive–which never came up in my testing–but when I was standing in front of the company showing it off…it really showed its true colors.

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

The value I like the most is Find a Way. I find it encompasses a lot of the other values. There's so many things here where we will talk about doing something, and in other companies that would be the kind of thing that you talk about and happens, whereas here you find a way and just make these things happen.

Q: What is your favorite benefit we have?

I like our last Friday of the month. I'm sure lots of other people will bring this up. It's quite nice knowing that at the end of each month we're all off; it’s a holiday for everyone. It's not like, you know, the odd day you take off at the end of a week where it feels like you're cramming the week into four days. You know that everyone's off and it makes the week feel a bit more relaxed as well.

Q: What is your favorite Slack channel?

I've got a couple of contenders for my favorite Slack channel, but if I have to choose one, it has to be #things-jack-says, which is for Jack Buckmelter in our New York office. People share quotes from him—he once called my kilt a skirt.

Q: What advice would you give to candidates interviewing?

For people interviewing I'd suggest being yourself as much as possible. I know it's very hard in an interview, but we're very aware that people are interviewing are under stress and we take all of that into account. I think it's just great to see people who bring the most legitimate version of themselves personality-wise. When it comes to technical solutions, I'd much rather chat to someone who shows off the best example of a thing that they built and they know well, rather than them pretending that they know something else, because it really shines through and you can have a much more valuable conversation about it.

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

Fun, fast and freaky.

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

Last Friday of the month is a great time to mark off each month and decompress. I also like the little nudge it gives me to book a holiday or do something because you know that we're off and the rest of the country isn't necessarily.

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

I'm looking forward to making On-call so much better. We have launched a product that I think is really cool but there's so, so many more things that we want to do and they're really fun to ship so I'm looking forward to it.

Q: What is it like being part of the On-call team?

It's really fun being part of the On-call team. I've worked in consumer products before where you're building stuff that you know, but rarely are you building stuff where it interacts with you in such negative experiences when you're dealing with incidents and things going wrong. So working on a product that makes those times easier is really nice, and I can see that in the whole team, everyone's really enthusiastic about working on this product.

Q: What was something that surprised you when you joined?

I think what surprised me is that while the pace is really high, we set everyone up to succeed. You're trusted from day one to go and build things and own things. Things like our developer experience are set up for you to just run 100 miles an hour and we invest in that to make that something that we can do. I think how much I was trusted to do things quickly and have an impact, but also how easy that was to do; it was really cool.

Q: What has been your favorite customer interaction?

One of our customers sent me a box of the most beautiful chocolates you've ever seen as a thank you for a feature we made called the post-incident flow. It's not an area that a lot of people love but those who do really love it, love it and yeah, the chocolates were great.

Q: If you could work in another team for the day, what team would you join and why?

I think I would join the Customer Success team. I think it's really nice to talk with customers and I know it's not always easy, you're trying to balance competing priorities and everything, but I think we do things well and it works for customers. I really like the positive interactions you get from that.

Q: What is exciting about working in incident management?

It's really interesting to work in incident management because it's a product that you're using all the time. We are declaring several incidents a day which might sound bad but we have a really low bar for incidents, so we use the product a lot and are probably the biggest users of our product. That pays huge dividends, giving you the ability to analyze the product and spot things before your customers do. We have great insights into what things we need to improve and why.

Q: What is something unusual about being part of the On-call team?

When we launched the app, one of our investors is in the band The Chainsmokers and we kind of joked about the fact that they might record us a ringtone or something for when you get paged. We didn’t think this would become a reality, but it did, which is really, really cool!

Q: How does incident.io recognize achievements and milestones?

I think in the day-to-day, we do a great job of having Slack channels where you can call out people for cool things they've done or give gratitude for something that they might have done for you. For larger product launches, we do little ceremonies where we’ll print a poster of a product feature, everyone signs their name on it, and we hang it up in the office.

We'll be back next week with more Behind the Flame content 👀