Motorway is the UK's fastest-growing used car marketplace, connecting car sellers directly with over 7,500 dealers across the country. Selling a car every two minutes on average, Motorway has facilitated over half a million car sales since inception. For a platform handling such emotionally and financially significant transactions (cars are typically someone's second-largest asset after their home, and people often name their cars), system reliability and smooth customer experiences are critical. Unlike high-transaction websites where customers can simply try again later, car sellers rarely have second chances, making every interaction important.
Challenges before incident.io
Motorway's incident management approach could be summarised in two words: "fragmented and manual." The team was juggling multiple disconnected systems: Opsgenie for on-call, Jira for tracking, and Slack for communication. Incident response required the manual "gluing together with a framework" to coordinate engineering teams.
This fragmentation created significant operational pain. On-call engineers spent lots of time on administrative overhead before addressing the actual technical issue: spinning up Slack rooms, matching Jira ticket numbers, inviting the right people, and posting updates to various channels. Meanwhile, that same engineer had to simultaneously manage business stakeholders wanting updates, operations teams needing information, and other engineering teams offering help.
The disconnected nature of their tools made learning from incidents "really, really hard and nearly impossible," which created negative connotations around incident response when the team should have been embracing incidents as learning opportunities. Perhaps most problematically, decisions were based on gut feel rather than concrete data. One-off requests accumulated across the organization, but as Matt explains, "it's too easy to say oh, it's just a one off but over time, those one-offs add up."
Why Motorway chose incident.io
Matt had been following incident.io's development, impressed by the team's deep understanding of incident management. Several factors made incident.io the clear choice:
- End-to-end lifecycle: The addition of incident.io On-call provided complete incident management from alerting to resolution
- Cultural alignment: incident.io's focus on continuous improvement and rapid feature development matched Motorway's innovation-driven culture
- Significant uplift: The platform offered substantial improvements over their existing fragmented approach
- Proven expertise: It was clear the incident.io founding team had "lived through many incidents themselves"
“If you're going to change someone's muscle memory, their patterns and practices, it needs to be a really big uplift from whatever you're using at the moment. And that's what we found.”
Implementation and adoption
Motorway's rollout was remarkably swift. "Within a couple of days, we had a proof of concept up and running," Matt reports. The full deployment took only two weeks, primarily due to integrating with single sign-on and migrating existing Terraform alerts.
The implementation strategy proved particularly effective. "We gave it to our platform team to set up, trial it, run a proof of concept... they became the advocates for everyone else," Matt explains. This approach allowed the platform team to train other teams and spread knowledge organically throughout the organization.
The shared Slack channel with incident.io's team provided great support throughout the process, offering rapid responses to configuration questions and best practice guidance. The test incident feature proved unexpectedly valuable, allowing engineers to safely explore the platform without impacting metrics, something that became really important for building confidence among team members.
AI notetaking with Scribe
Motorway's team was particularly impressed with Scribe, incident.io's AI-powered documentation assistant. They found that Scribe:
- Eliminates manual stakeholder updates during incidents
- Prevents context switching between platforms during high-pressure situations
- Automatically captures critical details for post-mortems that would otherwise be lost in Slack conversations
- Enables leaders to follow incidents remotely without disrupting the response team
"The Scribe feature alone is worth it alone. We can just focus on getting the fix done. I was able to leave a call and let the team get on with it, just following along in the channel," Matt notes.
Results
Since implementing incident.io, Motorway has seen major improvements across their engineering organization. The most significant impact has been the dramatic reduction in time engineers spend on reactive incident work, which directly translates to increased development velocity and supports their "create new roads" company value focused on innovation.
The platform has enabled true data-driven decision making, replacing the gut feel approach they had previously. They've achieved approximately 60% improvement in proactive detection, with issues now caught by internal observability rather than customer reports. This shift toward proactive incident management has been crucial for maintaining customer trust in their marketplace.
✅ Eliminated administrative overhead: The five-minute setup process has been replaced with automated incident channels and workflows
✅ Better cross-functional collaboration: Customer support and contact center agents can now easily raise triage tickets, preventing issues from being dismissed as "one-offs"
✅ Operational excellence culture: Regular operational excellence meetings every two weeks now feature detailed incident data and breakdowns, fostering continuous learning
The cultural transformation around incidents has been equally important. What once carried negative connotations has become an opportunity for proactive learning and improvement. As Matt notes, teams now have "the ability to go do that with a data-driven approach" when they want to focus on resolving organizational challenges.
For a marketplace where every transaction involves someone's second-largest asset and deeply personal decisions, reliable incident management isn't just about uptime. It's what allows Motorway to maintain the trust of both sellers and dealers while continuing to scale at startup pace. With incident.io handling the operational complexity, their engineering teams can focus on what matters most: building the innovations that keep them the UK's fastest-growing used car marketplace.
