What we've learned from powering incident response at 100's of leading companies including:
We’re on a mission to help every organization become more reliable, continuously improve, and inspire confidence in those who rely on them. It’s not just what we build in service of this mission that matters, it’s how we build it. These principles guide our teams to focus on the right things and drive the highest impact.
Great tools are simple but powerful. We design every experience within the platform to be intuitive and ready to use out of the box with little to no configuration. A user interface should show you the info you need for the task you’re accomplishing, without distracting extraneous information.
Many tools used in the incident response space are general purpose automation tools, or add-ons from tools that service another part of the stack. We are different. We are a purpose-built incident management platform. We don’t bloat the platform with features that don’t directly drive our mission.
You don’t need to be an incident response expert to use Rootly effectively. We don’t A/B test features and implement the most popular version—we’ve helped users manage thousands of incidents, and we know what works. We infuse this knowledge throughout the platform as default settings (we refer to these as “smart defaults”) so users are armed with best practices from the moment they sign up.
Tooling should eliminate toil and friction, not contribute to it. We don’t want users to think of Rootly as something they go out of their way to use. Interaction with the tool should be seamless with the work they’re already doing.
To keep implementation simple, it’s crucial to think beyond our own tool. We put a big focus on compatibility and integration with other parts of the DevOps stack, like observability and task management tools, which allows us to remain laser focused on incident management.
Velocity cannot come at the expense of reliability and performance. In addition to our new feature roadmap, we ship quality of life improvements in every development cycle. Because of the business critical nature of our product, especially when it comes to alerting, we invest heavily in a multi-cloud redundant infrastructure.
We’re acutely aware that our customers use Rootly on their worst days. When we test features, we ask ourselves “What if I was in the midst of a SEV0? Would this be fast enough?”, “Would this add friction or reduce it?”, etc. In incidents, every second count and every move carries extra impact.
A deep understanding of the customer experience is essential to all functions, and just looking at data points on a dashboard isn’t going to get us there. Everyone—from engineers to marketers to executives—regularly speaks with our customers directly, and not just when things go wrong. We’re proactively engaging with our users to gain a real understanding of their journey and challenges. We make this easy by creating a shared Slack channel for every organization that uses Rootly, and even giving them the ability to page our team for urgent issues.
No matter your role at the company, one of the first things people learn is how to demo the product. Not only does this ensure everyone is comfortable navigating the product in customer conversations, it also gives us consistent insight into the experience for a brand-new user
We do not hire managers that aren’t experts in their craft. Without domain expertise, managers become unreliable conduits for direction from senior leadership. In order to properly advocate for their teams and convey strategic direction effectively, we expect managers to have a deep understanding and involvement in the day to day work of their ICs.
While our product works at all scales, from startup to enterprise and in between, it’s not the right solution for everyone, and that’s okay. Every new customer relationship starts with a discovery process to make sure that new users understand the intent of the product and the work it supports. We don’t waste time trying to force-fit the platform as something it isn’t.
Great tools are simple but powerful. We design every experience within the platform to be intuitive and ready to use out of the box with little to no configuration. A user interface should show you the info you need for the task you’re accomplishing, without distracting extraneous information.
Many tools used in the incident response space are general purpose automation tools, or add-ons from tools that service another part of the stack. We are different. We are a purpose-built incident management platform. We don’t bloat the platform with features that don’t directly drive our mission.
You don’t need to be an incident response expert to use Rootly effectively. We don’t A/B test features and implement the most popular version—we’ve helped users manage thousands of incidents, and we know what works. We infuse this knowledge throughout the platform as default settings (we refer to these as “smart defaults”) so users are armed with best practices from the moment they sign up.
Tooling should eliminate toil and friction, not contribute to it. We don’t want users to think of Rootly as something they go out of their way to use. Interaction with the tool should be seamless with the work they’re already doing.
To keep implementation simple, it’s crucial to think beyond our own tool. We put a big focus on compatibility and integration with other parts of the DevOps stack, like observability and task management tools, which allows us to remain laser focused on incident management.
Velocity cannot come at the expense of reliability and performance. In addition to our new feature roadmap, we ship quality of life improvements in every development cycle. Because of the business critical nature of our product, especially when it comes to alerting, we invest heavily in a multi-cloud redundant infrastructure.
We’re acutely aware that our customers use Rootly on their worst days. When we test features, we ask ourselves “What if I was in the midst of a SEV0? Would this be fast enough?”, “Would this add friction or reduce it?”, etc. In incidents, every second count and every move carries extra impact.
A deep understanding of the customer experience is essential to all functions, and just looking at data points on a dashboard isn’t going to get us there. Everyone—from engineers to marketers to executives—regularly speaks with our customers directly, and not just when things go wrong. We’re proactively engaging with our users to gain a real understanding of their journey and challenges. We make this easy by creating a shared Slack channel for every organization that uses Rootly, and even giving them the ability to page our team for urgent issues.
No matter your role at the company, one of the first things people learn is how to demo the product. Not only does this ensure everyone is comfortable navigating the product in customer conversations, it also gives us consistent insight into the experience for a brand-new user
We do not hire managers that aren’t experts in their craft. Without domain expertise, managers become unreliable conduits for direction from senior leadership. In order to properly advocate for their teams and convey strategic direction effectively, we expect managers to have a deep understanding and involvement in the day to day work of their ICs.
While our product works at all scales, from startup to enterprise and in between, it’s not the right solution for everyone, and that’s okay. Every new customer relationship starts with a discovery process to make sure that new users understand the intent of the product and the work it supports. We don’t waste time trying to force-fit the platform as something it isn’t.
Incidents build great companies. Imagine a person who had never had anything go wrong in their entire life. They had never failed, never made a mistake, never felt embarrassed. Would that be the type of person you look up to and aspire to be? Probably not.
The people we admire are those who have experienced real challenges and overcome them to become a better, more resilient version of themselves. We believe that companies are no different. Incidents are an unavoidable—even necessary—part of running a business.
But it isn’t enough to simply have incidents. How we handle them, talk about them, and learn from them matters, and it’s changing as fast as the technology industry itself. As active members in the incident response and reliability community, and stewards of a platform that has seen over 150,000 incidents, we have a front-row seat to understand and influence change as it happens in our industry.
These are the ideas that we believe best represent the modern era of incident response. Together, they make up our modern incident response philosophy—the “new world” of incident response we, together with our customers and community, are driving forward.
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