On the road to becoming the best incident management solution on the market

We're on a mission: to be the best incident management solution available.

This might sound a bit lofty, but it’s one of our biggest motivating factors day in and day out. And although it's hard to believe that we're already closing in on year three of this story, we have to acknowledge that there's still a lot of work to do.

Thanks to the continuous stream of feedback we receive, it seems we're on the right track though. Again, the journey isn't over, but it's important to reflect on wins to ground yourself and remember what you're working towards.

Here, we’ve compiled some wonderful words shared by our customers that encapsulate what we’re trying to do here at incident.io.

Quality meets pace

Early on, we codified pushing the pace as one of our core values.

However, the benefits of moving quickly can be moot if there’s no polish or refinement to what we ship.

How do we move with pace while keeping the bar high? Polish Parties.

In a nutshell, Polish Parties are our way of maintaining product quality and polish without excessively slowing development and release cycles. They're focused and cross-functional review sessions where we collect feedback on things like user experience, copy, and design.

As we scale, it’s important for us to put effort behind an “all hands on deck” approach to building. The reality is that when someone works on a project for a long time, they miss out on some outside context and may gloss over certain details.

Polish Parties are our way of addressing these pain points head-on. By running these, we can achieve three things:

• First, these feedback sessions allow folks to churn through changes efficiently.
• Second, we can maintain a high bar for quality. Nothing slips through the cracks when pushing products live.
• Third, we engrain a culture where everyone feels heard, seen, and respected.

An intuitive UI that improves incident communication

One of the main reasons why Polish Parties are successful is that team members focus on clear communication.

As any incident responder will tell you, unambiguous communication can be the difference between resolving an incident or having it run on for longer than it should.

Because of this, it was important to focus on designing a solution that made it easy to communicate clearly and enabled more efficient incident resolution.

A few key workflows make this possible. First, a simple yet intuitive UI that brings calm during incidents. And second, solutions like Status Pages to extend clear communication to internal and external stakeholders.

First, the UI.

Once an incident is declared, a single Slack channel is created. That becomes your central location to manage said incident. Then, all subsequent actions happen in that channel: an escalation, a Status Page update, a hand-off of incident lead duties, etc.

By keeping incident response in a single channel, every action related to that incident is highly visible to all involved.

Second, internal and customer-facing Status Pages.

These were highly requested features from folks who wanted an efficient way to update stakeholders, both internal and external, about any incidents that were occurring. And now, with automatic Status Pages updates, this workflow fosters even better and timely communication.

Together, these features help turn communication from a sore spot into a true superpower by emphasizing clarity and visibility.

Better learning from incidents

At incident.io, we place quite a lot of emphasis on the post-incident process. So much so that we have an entire team dedicated to looking into ways to improve our post-mortem features.

We firmly believe that incidents don’t end when they’re closed out; this just marks the beginning of your learning opportunity.

We built Insights as one of our core products to facilitate better, more actionable learning from incidents. Spoiler: We’re working on some updates to the dashboard as we speak.

If you haven’t seen what Insights has to offer, then here’s a quick summary of some of the data points you can look forward to:

• MTTX: Datapoints that can help you answer questions such as, “Is our mean-time-to-respond increasing?” or “Which of our services has the lowest time-to-detection?”
• Seasonality: To help you answer questions such as, “Do our incidents concentrate around certain days of the month?” or “What do we expect incident workload to be around the Christmas holidays?”
• Pager load: A measure of how your team is responding to on-call, helping to answer questions like “What's the trend in the number of times my team is being paged?” or “Are there only a few people who have been woken up out of hours?”
• Readiness: A set of data points that gives you insight into questions like “How many people have recently responded to incidents involving this service and are likely to know how to handle future incidents?” and “Is our responder base growing or shrinking?”
• …and so, so much more

These aren’t just a collection of your traditional incident response and efficiency metrics. We’re highlighting efficiency at an operational level.

This helps give folks a comprehensive picture of every facet of their incident response: from people management to on-call schedules. The result is better, more actionable learning from incidents without the overhead of tracking these yourself.

Smooth adoption

And finally, adoption. As the saying goes, the best tool is the one that you’re actually going to use. This is sage advice that rings true, especially when it comes to incident management.

If you end up onboarding a tool that’s not only time-consuming to get up and running but also a headache to use, you’re unlikely to get much use out of it. This is exactly what we designed incident.io to combat: complexity fatigue.

Not only are incidents easy to declare in seconds, but the UI is intuitive and straightforward without sacrificing functionality. And above all else, getting up and running is as simple as installing us into Slack, and you’re ready to go.

We’ve decided to keep the user interface lightweight and simple without sacrificing functionality.

We can only be the best if you help us get there

We opened this blog with the declaration that we’re on a mission to be the best incident management solution on the market. There’s a big contingency here–we can only do this with your help.

If you’re currently a customer, reach out to us and tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and any areas of friction or improvement that we can work towards. If you’re in the market for a new incident management solution, sign up for a trial and let us know your thoughts. Big, small, bugs, moments of delight, everything counts.

Even if you decide to go with another option, we still value any and all feedback you’re willing to give.

Once again, while we have signals that we’re on the right track, we still have so much more work to do, and that work will never be over until you say it is.

Now, nearly 1600 words later, we’ll leave you with two more:

thank you.