LIVE from Denver with Nora Jones! (Interview)

29:01And so I think it's just AI will really, really help with the kind of tedious, repetitive incidents and automation around them that I think would save us all a lot of time and allow us to focus on the things that really need our focus. Are you at a level where you're still involved with the incidents? Are you overproducts? Like, how much do you talk to the user, I suppose, is the question. And two, can you give some details on the specifics of the novel incidents? Like, a terrible one or just like when you're like, wow, that would have never been in my imagination before. Yeah. So I'm not in incidents anymore, but I'm talking to our customers and our users every single day.

29:48And it's, you know, it's still one of my favorite topics. I definitely do disaster tourism in our incident channel just to see and understand. But I know better than to try to hop in. But I think a lot of the new and novel is going to be around the leveraging agents, leveraging generative AI in parts of production in areas that we don't understand. I think that's really where a lot of it's going to come up. I'm very curious about the company that had their code base deleted. I would love to read that incident review when it comes out. Undelete that, AI. Undelete it now. Yes, undo, undo, undo. Are there any, this could be historical as well, not necessarily new and novel, but any fun incidences that are no longer under NDA?

30:44You don't have to name any names or anything like that, but certainly there are probably situations that have become legend amongst your teams over time, maybe internally, or maybe just anonymously, externally, crazy stuff that's happened. Can you think of anything? It doesn't have to be the craziest ever. Like recent? No, just whenever. I mean, yeah, I have my favorite incidents. I always joke that when I'm old, I'm just going to be reciting incident numbers because 712 still sticks in my head and 659. Like, I remember those incidents because I basically slept in the office that night, you know, trying to resolve it.

31:25And I think, I mean, a lot of the incidents were trying to figure out in a very simple way how a piece of technology was supposed to work. And a lot of the times we had put the technology through the paces and almost leveraged it to do the things that it wasn't meant to do, right? Like console, for example, Kafka, like those, those have been in some pretty hairy incidents in my experience. And a lot of the time it's because we implemented them without having deep subject matter expertise in them. And then, you know, we also saw the power and the flexibility of some of it and used it for things that it wasn't necessarily meant to be used for.

32:14and then a lot of the folks that design those things don't work at the company anymore, right? So then you're trying to figure out live what the intention was of this decision and what the expectation was and what's actually happening. And, you know, those can get pretty complex. Can you take us tactically into, I know you spent, you said a first year kind of integrating. When did you begin this kind of newer role? Was it a year after, like, you integrated and you started forming a team? take us tactically into forming that team, strategy, rejiggering PagerDuty product, pricing? How did you rethink a lot of what was going on there?

32:52Yeah. So when I joined PagerDuty, we had two main product orgs. We had incident management, and then we had another product org that was doing automation and AI, and it was kind of focusing on other use cases, so like CS users or FinOps. So we obviously went into the incident management organization. There was no team around post-incident reviews. And they did have an integration team that was in charge of a bunch of different integrations, so like ServiceNow, Datadog. that team was also in charge of the Slack integration, but it had been very under-invested in. So they, you know, I obviously had the team I came in with, and then I also had the chat experience team is what we called it, which was our Slack and Teams integrations.

33:54And so the very first task we had to do was, you know, we were obviously selling Jelly standalone loan prior to the acquisition, the very first task we had to do was to get it into one of the existing pager duty plans, which was the enterprise plan. And, you know, working at a startup, I was using products that get things into SKUs really quickly, and I didn't realize the complexities of it in a large organization. You know, when that was deemed my first task, I'm like, cool, that'll take like 20 minutes. That did not take 20 minutes. So I learned a lot about that process. And then it was also taking the existing PagerDuty Slack app and bringing all the Jelly functionality into that Slack app.

34:44So that took about a year to really fully integrate. And it's live, so you should check it out. And then, you know, midway through the year, that was when I kind of had that realization that our pricing wasn't totally matching our value. And so I just, you know, kind of like, I just kept sharing it in meetings over and over again until I think I annoyed enough people that they were like, okay, you can go do it. And then I ended up in the head of pricing role after that. You have a new job now. I have a new job now. Yeah, exactly. So after launching it in all three product lines, we went through a reorg internally and aligned our organization a bit more to the customer value, which was around six months ago.

35:34And so my new pillar of the org is product strategy, growth, and pricing. So I have pricing analysts under me. I have engineers working on growth, onboarding. I have folks working on insights and analytics, so really driving what are patterns we're seeing and how do we feed that back in so that we can help you with the well-understood. And then, yeah, pricing analysts and product intelligence folks as well. So they are looking at how users are using the product, which areas they're getting the most value out of to really understand where we should keep investing in. Growth at Jelly, OG Jelly, was probably different than growth at PagerDuty.

36:25Can you go into some of the details of how it's different, how it's changed? Is it scary? Is it just way bigger? Do you have more money to spend, bigger distribution because you have much more customers? What's it like? I mean, yeah, we have way more customers, right? Like, at Jelly, you know, I had personal phone numbers of all of our customers, right? Like, that's not able to be the case at PagerDuty. And so, I also have to, like, I think customer relationships are so important, but I obviously can't have relationships with all of our customers now. So, I also have to, like, use more discernment and I try to form relationships based on where I'm seeing usage.

37:02You know, so like for example, we have an incident roles function or capability in the product. And I, you know, and we obfuscate a lot of the data, but I could see like people were creating a manual scribe role. And we actually have like automation that does that for you, right? So that no one's like typing the entire Zoom call, which is, you know, that's not a great use of time. like that would actually be a good use of AI. So, you know, I'll reach out in those situations. And that's sort of really how I think about it. I'm thinking about it from the customer relationship perspective. And I'm also thinking about it in terms of like an entire incident life cycle from like detecting to triaging to mobilizing a team to resolving to learning.

37:53If I see customers that are like only here, I try to go talk to them. Because when you're only in the detect and like the noise phase without having standard processes all the way over here, you're going to end up in this hamster wheel. And you could actually drive a lot more improvement and save a lot more time. So that's really how I think about it is just in terms of customer value, which I think is where my background really helps. Like I really love being in this role because I've been a user. and so it's nice for that to come full circle. How much code do you write? Zero. I mean, just in my free time, yeah, but not at work, yeah.

38:38Is it because AI is writing it for you? How much code do I write? Way less than I wrote a couple months ago. If you set AI aside and imagine, like OpenAI hadn't done what they did with ChatGPT November of 22 and everybody freaked out and it changed the course of the industry. What would the product roadmap look like? What would the product? Like you're looking at product at PagerDuty, right? Your initiatives certainly changed. I'm not sure how multi-threaded you guys are in terms of things you can work on at the same time. But everybody has to have an AI strategy. And that's because everybody has to have an AI strategy.

39:17So that drives product. We were actually joking about it last night at the meetup. It's kind of like when one cool kid in middle school gets Air Jordans, whether they're ugly or not, it's like everybody has to, what's your Air Jordan strategy? Like, how are you going to, how are you going to get the Air Jordans? And it's like, I got to figure something out. I don't know. My friends are going to ask. That's kind of AI right now where it's like, what's your strategy? You have to have one. So like that's driving a lot of the, yeah, the product roadmaps, right? Like if that wasn't something you had to think about, yeah, you would have more freedom to build kind of what you would like to, or I mean, Maybe you haven't thought about that because you're too busy thinking about what you have to think about, but in a world where you didn't have that necessity, what would it look like?

39:59I mean, I think it has driven some of our product roadmap, but it's also made us faster in a lot of ways. I don't spend a lot of time coding in my organization because that's not my best value to the customers or to the company or to the folks I'm managing. right? But what I have found AI useful and is not just like driving the product roadmap, it's like actually aligning folks, right? I can have it, you know, if I have an idea or if I've been seeing a lot of customer data, I can mock up something really quickly and have a conversation with our engineers, our designers, and our executives way more quickly than I could have otherwise, right we don't have to spend a lot of time like in a lot of design cycles getting that initial wire frame we can just start to visualize and so I think it's been really actually helpful with remote work from that perspective especially when you can't get in a whiteboard with someone so I do think it's it's made us faster like I think we would be slower sure I would certainly be slower without it I think in just like Air Jordans I mean you run faster with the nice Jordans what's that with i was just i was making a joke it was bad you run faster if you have jordans yes yeah exactly sorry so but yeah in terms of the the product roadmap like you know i don't think there's never going to be a world where we have zero incidents right like um and so i think those are some of the wrong problems to go after with ai is like trying to get to like zero incidents it's more to handle the more well-understood stuff so that engineers can focus their time on things that only they can do rather than things that agents or AI can help with.

41:57I think the whole industry is going to get it wrong in some cases. We are very new at this, and we're all kind of like stumbling toddlers with AI right now. And so we're going to mess up. And I think we just have to like reflect on here's a good use for it and here's a not so good use for it rather than trying to use it for everything. And so that's my biggest worry is that people are going to get overly dependent on it for things that they should not get overly dependent on it for. I agree with that. Yeah, and earlier, when you're talking about novel incidents or like the really tough ones, where you need that one subject matter expert to come in and be like, to connect the dots that nobody else could connect, right?

42:48Do you, I don't want to use the word fear necessarily, are you concerned that increased adoption of AI tooling reduces gradually subject matter expertise? I'm definitely concerned about that. I think there's ways that it increases subject matter expertise. You know, I started Jelly before all of this, you know, was really happening. And my honest vision for Jelly was there is so much data in how you communicate that you can learn what Adam's expertise is and what Jared's expertise is just by how they're talking, right? Like, oh, we notice we pull Adam in for every issue we have with this particular code base.

43:33And so we start making this like map of Adam's expertise and we can start to download how Adam knows what he knows and how he does what he does. Or doesn't. Or doesn't. And making that like searchable. And so I always wanted to put AI in jelly, but it was, and then all of everything changed. And so I actually think it could really enhance subject matter expertise because it has a look into your whole organization. I think the challenge is with hallucination with that, right? Like, is it going to make up stuff that it's not actually seen? And I also think that humans could stop trusting their own judgment sometimes, you know.

44:19And I'll always test myself sometimes. If I feel like I'm personally using AI too much, I will ask it a question that I know I have a lot of expertise in just to see how it does. And I feel like that helps me come back to earth sometimes just to make sure I'm staying grounded. But I think we all have that personal responsibility. But it's also going to change the way we talk to each other. like I think a lot about the language aspects of it and you know I think about like like kids that are probably learning with that now like how are they going to talk to each other in the workspace you know in a certain amount of time so anyway those those are things that yeah yeah to that point there was a recent headline about changes in language yeah and how chat GPT in particular is already affecting the way that we talk.

45:15For instance, the word delve is like skyrocketing in use because it routinely says delve. Like let me delve into that for you. And now more people are saying delve. This happens all the time in humanity. You hang out with people and you start to talk like those people and we're just hanging out with ChatGPT. Right. And so we're going to start talking. It's not just X, it's Y. It always says that too. Yeah, exactly. And I've always loved using em dashes, but I also find myself not using M dashes. And I'm so upset about it because I've been using it for years. Me too. Now I'm rethinking like, are people going to think I wrote this with AI because I'm using an M dash?

45:54Right. So you purposely remove them. I purposely remove it. Because you don't want to look like this as AI generator. Yeah. Can we go into, I'm not sure how this manifests for you, but as a leader, it seems like maybe you all have some tooling that lets you glimpse into someone's capabilities. I imagine that's a great tool as a leader because you want to spend one-on-ones with folks. Some of the team you know really well because you brought them with you from Jelly, but some you're bringing on. And as a leader, you want to know what their strengths and weaknesses are. Do you have that kind of insight?

46:25Is that what you're talking about where you can sort of like probe into your team to say, okay, Jared's really good at this and Adam's really good at that. And you have the AI kind of like learn it for you and you can sort of prompt whatever it might be. need to learn more about your team. I haven't been using it for that perspective, but I do, you know, as I, as I build out my org and I'm interviewing folks right now, and I've interviewed folks that are like really great and clearly experts in a certain position, but I'm also thinking about the expertise of the current team I have. Right. And if like, there's these four different areas I need expertise in with pricing, for example, if I already have someone in that bucket and I'm interviewing someone that, you know, also has the same expertise, that's not going to maybe be valuable for me to hire that person, even though they're great.

47:15And so I do think that that could be helpful in terms of just like creating teams that work really well together and looking at where someone's strength is, right? Like I have someone on the pricing team that like loves to go into the data, right? Like data, data expert, um, but is not as like, um, proactive with like, you know, talking to sales and talking to customers. Right. And so like, as I was looking for my next person, I was like, I really need someone that is like doing that in the organization. I don't necessarily need them to be a deep expert in the data because I already have that.

47:55And so, you know, but I know that just because I interact with my team a lot. I think if you are running a large org that, you know, that might be helpful. I also, I use Granola, which is really, really great. I don't know if either of you use it. What is it called? Granola. Never heard of it. It's like, it's a note taker during meetings. And I have found that so fantastic, especially for one-on-ones. It just, you know, helps me remember them. It helps me actually be present so that I'm not having to like take notes during it. It prompts me of things to follow up on. And so I feel like it's, it's actually like made me a better manager because I'm able to be more present and, and recall more.

48:44How is, I hate to keep going to AI, man, but how is, I was just saying, I hate to keep talking about AI kind of, but I'm curious how AI is helping you not hire or let go of people. Can you be candid about how it's shrinking or growing your teams? Yeah, I mean, I know I probably sound like a broken record, but I really think it takes over the tasks that people were probably doing manually that they didn't need to be doing, right? And so I think it increases roles in that it is going to completely change certain jobs where someone's entire job was manual data entry. I spend a lot of time in Tableau and Periscope and unfortunately Excel now.

49:35And when I get stuck or break something, I actually use AI to help me fix my query. And that's been really nice for me in just terms of speed.

50:12and CEO of Depot. Okay, so Kyle, based on the premise that most teams want faster builds, that's probably a truth. If they're using CI providers with their stock configuration or GitHub actions, are they wrong? Are they not getting the fastest builds possible? I would take it a step further and say if you're using any CI provider with just the basic things that they give you, which is if you think about a CI provider, it is in essence a lowest common denominator generic VM and then you're left to your own devices to essentially configure that VM and configure your build pipeline effectively pushing down to you the developer the responsibility of optimizing and making those builds fast making them fast making them secure making them cost effective like all pushed down to you the problem with modern day ci providers is there's still a set of features, a set of capabilities that a CI provider could give a developer that makes their builds more performant out of the box, makes their builds more cost effective out of the box and more secure out of the box.

51:18I think a lot of folks adopt GitHub Actions for its ease of implementation and being close to where their source code already lives inside of GitHub. And they do care about build performance and they do put in the work to optimize those builds. But fundamentally, CI providers today don't prioritize performance. Performance is not a top level entity inside of generic CI providers. Yes. Okay, friends, save your time, get faster builds with Depot, Docker builds, faster GitHub action runners, and distributed remote caching for Bazel, Go, Gradle, Turbo Repo, and more. Depot is on a mission to give you back your dev time and help you get faster build times with a one-line code change.

51:58Learn more at depot.dev. get started with a seven-day free trial. No credit card required. Again, depot.dev.

52:12What are you excited about? What are you interested in, whether industry or elsewise? What am I excited about? Well, she's golfing now. She's a golfer. Yeah, I've golfed twice. You're a golfer. I think I'm a golfer now. Yeah, for sure. No imposters. I was talking to Adam earlier. he was like, I mean, I just hit the ball. I don't really golf, you know, it's not, I like really, really resonate with that. I can hit the ball and it feels good. Right. So, but yeah, what am I interested in? Um, you know, I, I'm really interested in like how, um, linguistics are, are changing, uh, with AI and also just like more remote first coat cultures.

52:53Like we really lean on text communication now more than ever. And I think things can easily be misinterpreted over text, which actually can cause a lot of... That's a good response for people. In text, they say, sure. Oh, yeah, exactly. One word, it's like, sure. Yeah, or K. And I'm like, what does he mean by sure? I say that all the time. When I joined PagerDuty, everyone reacted with the ack emoji, which is a very engineering thing to do. but I had people that weren't in engineering join PagerDuty and they thought people were mad at them because they're reacting with the word ACK in Slack. And I'm like, oh no, they're not mad at you.

53:33They're just giving you a thumbs up. Do they know there's a thumbs up emoji they could use? What's that? I said there is a thumbs up emoji they could use. I know, exactly. Are you using the at? ACK, A-C-K. Oh, A-C-K. Which I think the history of that usage at PagerDuty is because you're acknowledging an alert. And so people use it internally more than I've ever seen at any other organization to just be like, okay, cool. But they're not upset about anything. And so anyway, I'm thinking a lot about how these nuances, we all have our own perspective of how to communicate and organize. And it really impacts the organization.

54:16It really impacts how products get shipped and developed. It impacts how incidents get resolved. And so I've been, you know, looking more into that lately. I've been following this guy on Substack, Adam Aleksic. He's a linguistics graduate from Harvard, and he's been, you know, really just analyzing how the world is, like, changing its communication. But I'm really interested in how that impacts organizations and how it impacts products. We are live before a studio audience. They are hearing this, but can you share what's on the horizon? What's something new for PagerDuty that you're not, that you're excited about that you can maybe tease a little bit or just spill the beans on?

55:03Yeah, I mean, we are completely revamping our, I know this probably doesn't sound as exciting for folks, but it's very exciting to me. We're completely revamping our pricing and packaging so that, you know, you're not going to have to like worry about, you know, seats as much as you do. And it's a big transformation and it's really focused on value that we're providing. And so, you know, that's the little teaser. And then, And, you know, other things I'm really excited about are seeing how Jelly evolves within PagerDuty. There are a lot of insights that we have in Jelly. And combined with the insights of PagerDuty, I think, can really drive change to that beginning of that incident cycle.

55:55And so I'm pretty stoked about that and how that can help, like, onboard new engineers and how it can help ramp other folks up, like maybe ramp up a junior SRE because they can see how someone solved the problem. And so I'm excited about how it might level people up and create this new culture of engineering. Yeah. Well, Noor, you are smart, kind, and fun to talk to, so we really appreciate you joining us. This has been really awesome. Thank you. Let's hear it for Nora Jones. Nora Jones. Do you want to do a Q &A? So we're going to do a little Q &A? Sure. Okay. We do have nine minutes as I've been told.

56:45And he's correct. So we also have a microphone right here. And we have a little treat. Key chains. So the stickers are out there, free to have. But these key chains, these cost extra. To get a keychain, you have to come to this microphone and ask a thoughtful question for Nora. You can judge Nora whether it was a good question or not after you answer it. So if anybody has a question, please come on up for a keychain. Please say your name. I'm Nabil. So I kind of have a two-part question. It's about the acquisition, basically. So it sounds like a great match and everything, and so I imagine most people thought it made sense and everything, but I was just curious from Jelly's side before the acquisition actually happened, were there people that were against it?

57:36And maybe what were their rationale for that? Were there people that were what? Were there people from Jelly that didn't want the acquisition to happen, that were against it? And then maybe after the acquisition, if you're able to share that, was there a percentage that just kind of took their equity and left soon after or whatever? I'm just curious. I mean, I'll answer that as best as I can, but I think all acquisitions have challenges that come up. I think overall it was a very positive experience. And I actually was, I love reading research and I was actually reading a bunch of research on like what makes a successful acquisition.

58:18And a lot of the time it's if the founder stays. and so I also was trying to really focus on being happy myself because I knew I was modeling that to my team and figuring out those ways there were definitely people at the organization that you know hadn't worked at a large company before and it just it wasn't a fit for them right and so they moved on and that's that's totally okay I think that you know that makes sense in those situations and then I think there might have been some people that were initially like oh you know like there's always like when you're a 20 person company you like it's a really cool energy that you can't replicate in a 1200 person company and so I think there was grief involved with it from everyone's perspective including my own you know I've spent a lot of time like grieving like not being a founder anymore and you know it not being my baby like it's I think the hardest thing is when I see a problem and I'm like that is not my responsibility anymore I'm just going to say my words and then move on.

59:23But I think there were also some people that have been surprised by how much they like it that I think will probably stay at the organization for a long time. Thanks to Bill. Anything else? No, that's it. Thank you, sir. That was a good question. Good catch. Too soon. I thought you had it. James. Hi, folks. I'm James. One of the things that we know from other industries, avionics, nuclear, the list goes on, is after each incident, there's an incentive to make the system more automated, more safe, and that reduces the average number of incidents, but it increases the worst incidents. How does PagerDuty think about proactively helping organizations not just react to incidents, not just do their own thinking about incidents, but instill knowledge about how to design systems, how to design their organizations to prevent the catastrophic ones?

1:00:27Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think that the right approach after a gnarly incident is to set up automation. I think the right approach organizationally after a gnarly incident is to talk about it a lot. and try to figure out how it happened. Not why it happened, but how. And have these productive conversations where we're all sharing our piece of how we thought things were supposed to happen so that we can learn from each other and so we can learn about how this actually unfolded. I think until you have that understanding, automation is going to cause issues, to your point. and so I've been a big believer in that for a while when we were at Jell-A myself and Laura McGuire and Vanessa Hortzagranda we wrote what we called the How We Guide which stood for the How We Got Here Incident Analysis Guide which is free online but it talks about how to extract the most learnings after incidents so that you're better prepared in the future.

1:01:38And, you know, I didn't mention this aspect of like right when I came in, but one of the most important things to me when I came in was that we were using jelly internally and also practicing what we were preaching. And so we use jelly for every single incident now, and we are looking at how we communicate during those incidents, which is driving what we do or do not change. I don't, you know, I think with some incidents, like, you might not need an action item at the end of it. It doesn't mean that you didn't learn from it, but you, the action that you take might be understanding your system more.

1:02:16And so I think the best thing that we can do as PagerDuty is model that for folks so that we can help them do it themselves. Thanks, James. I'm really here for the key chain because I have a toddler. thanks James hi Nora I'm Kendall how long until you're twitchy and go do another thing say that one more time how long until you get twitchy and go do another thing and go do another company are you itching to leave and do something else when will you get the itch I mean there's probably golden handcuffs and there's probably like an appropriate answer but I'm curious what you're actually thinking I am having fun right now.

1:02:59I'm doing things that are challenging to me and I had never thought I would be doing pricing. Um, but it is activating both parts of my brain that I really love to activate, which is like psychology and, um, and math. And it's like very much, uh, an art and not a science, which is what I really, that's where I really thrive and gravitate towards. So I think as long as I'm like learning and feeling like I'm adding value and feeling like I can make a difference, you know, I don't think I will get an itch. But, you know, I'm also playing with different technologies that I can't necessarily, like, always play with at work.

1:03:42And I, you know, I haven't found something that, like, really captures my interest enough yet. But, yeah, I'm having a lot of fun. So. Thanks. thanks Kendall you got three more gosh I'm Jesse you said your first customer at Jelly was an enterprise customer and that's kind of rare how did you get that was that previous relationship or just cold outreach yeah good question so like I mentioned I have been an engineer most of my career and it was like within the reliability community so most of my network was in reliability. And so I was really building out in the open with people I knew. And I also previously worked for Netflix.

1:04:33I was working for a company that got acquired by Walmart, and I was working for Slack. And so I really only knew enterprises. I thought it was kind of an accident, but it was like, oh, you know, I was designing for something I needed in my organizations. And so I think that's just how it happened. And like, as we were building out in the open, we were looking for design partners and we had slots for five. And I tried to get five very different types of customers because I wanted to figure out who was finding the most value out of it. You know, we did one with like a startup and it went horribly actually.

1:05:14And then it went really well with this enterprise. And I remember, you know, talking to our investors about it. Cause like if you, if you have an investor and you're telling them that the first customer you're, you're signing as a enterprise customer, they're, they're going to try to talk you out of it because they don't think you're ready for it yet. And, um, like it was, it was way more organic for me to build for enterprise rather than to build for, for startups. So, yeah, that's awesome. I I think there's something to go down. Thank you very much for that question. Yeah, thank you. Yes. Two more.

1:05:49Matt. You've talked passionately about a lot of the things for post-incidence. And my expectation is that there's knowledge transfer and communication is hard. and I'm curious what your thoughts are on where PagerDuty and the aspects that are implemented there integrate with things outside of PagerDuty to help facilitate better knowledge transfer and communication across different divisions within an organization. Because not everybody implements all the things that you expect and so I would like to know what your expectations might be for how an organization might better leverage the product to make that vision a lot more usable.

1:06:43So if I'm understanding your question correctly, how can customers that are using PagerDuty best set it up so that they're creating a learning environment? Yeah, because these things are hard. And how do you help leverage making that easier? Yeah. Yeah, so one of the things I really appreciate about PagerDuty is how they've developed their integration system. You know, we don't expect customers to use this for everything, but you do get the most value out of it if you're connecting it to all the other tools that you're using. So there's over 700 integrations, and, like, you can also build your own, And I think that is the best way to get the value out of it because then we can understand all the signals that you might be seeing and really help you prioritize if something is a really urgent signal that deserves human attention versus not.

1:07:46That's where, you know, I think that's where I see setup go awry is when folks don't spend the time to set it up that way and then it just becomes more noisy than it needs to be. But if you are really taking a look at your overall company and being like, we use this product here, we use this product here, and really connecting it to PagerDuty, it's going to be a lot more valuable of a system that is not just learning from all that, but it's also surfacing a lot of that to you as well. do you see that as like a good way to interact or get that information to the parts outside of just the engineering and expose that understanding yeah so um so you restate that question please yeah so the question was do you see that just for engineering are you exposing it to everybody so that is something that was always on my mind with jelly is just like not keeping these learnings in a vacuum with just engineering.

1:08:47And it is challenging. It is like not an issue a tool can totally solve. It has to be a cultural change. It has to be an engineer going and talking to the person that launched a campaign and learning more about their world, right? And I think we really try to facilitate that. Like we show you all the people that were involved in an incident, even people that were just lurking, right? Which can be really interesting sometimes. Like, hey, why did legal hop on to lurk, right? Go DM that legal person and ask that, like, hey, I'm just, you know, re-evaluating this incident. I'd love to know what your interest was in it, right?

1:09:28And I think what we really try to provide with the platform is a way to make that less awkward because it's like you're just looking at the data. And the data points say that these different folks joined. so it's worthwhile to talk to them to get this holistic view of what really happened and so I think that's how we're really facilitating it that's cool thank you Matt next hi my name is Jim I wanted to ask you you've thought a lot about reliability so who when you were early in your career did you like study and reference like what's your velvet underground of reliability I actually started my career in hardware.

1:10:12I studied computer engineering and I went directly to a home security and smart home company. It's terrifying having that as your first job as a reliability person because if you mess up, someone's house might get robbed. So that was stressful. And then I saw this job opening at an e-commerce company for a software engineer. And that wasn't technically my role, right? I was doing less web development and doing more hardware. But I looked at some of the traits that were needed. It was like a developer productivity and reliability role. And I was like, you know, I do a bunch of this now. And so I just applied.

1:10:59And I joined the org. and they were having incidents multiple times a day, every day.

1:11:09The company was growing so quickly that there wasn't even a place to do our incident reviews. So we used to do them in the hallway every morning. And it was like the hallway next to the bathroom. So people were going like in and out of it. It was bananas. And I was really trying to get creative. Like my boss at that point was like, do whatever you want. Like, I don't care. Like we can just try things. And I found what Netflix was doing, which was called chaos engineering. And I started reading a lot about it. And I was like, wow, this is like really, really interesting because there is a big organizational psychology to reliability, too.

1:11:46It's not something that can just be fixed by fixing code. And so I started experimenting with it. And I was really influenced by Netflix. I started actually, I stumbled into the field guide for human error, which is in the aviation space. And so all of those things I think were really fundamental to my passion now and what I ended up following to learn more about it. And, you know, someone brought up other industries earlier. I also read post-incident reports from other industries as well because I, you know, know, I find it very fascinating and it is relevant a lot of the time too. Thank you.

1:12:27Is your book still for sale? It's my what? Your book. Yes, it is. Yeah. Go buy the book. There you go. We'll link out to it in the show notes. Let's hear it one more time. Nora Jones. Nora Jones, y 'all.

1:12:41So I'm not here to shame you, but you definitely missed out. This was fun. This was live. Live in front of people. A live show. So I got to say, it was cool to do. And it was really cool for those out there who came. We're so thankful to everyone who came to the meetup the night before, to the live show that day. And then the hike. Yes, we did a hike at Dinosaur Trail. So cool. Saw dinosaur tracks. Saw a beautiful view of the Red Rocks. Red Rock Amphitheater. So cool. And I want to take this time to thank everyone involved. Of course, Jared Santo behind the scenes, making this entire event happen.

1:13:19all the details, all the planning. Jared, he rocks. Gerhard and Jared, of course, on all the work around Pipely integration, James, Nabil, Matt, and many others pouring into this code base. Because of course, it's open source. GitHub.com slash the changelog slash Pipely. Check it out. So we can finally have full control over our own CDN built on the fly network. And And that leads me to Fly. Big thanks to our friends at Fly for supporting this podcast, for supporting our platform, for giving us the opportunity to build on the greatest, most revolutionary platform to build on today, fly.io. And of course, to the beat freak in residence, Breakmaster Cylinder.

1:14:10Okay, so if you love the beats that we produce, Breakmaster Cylinder is behind all those beats. Of course, it's a collaboration, but the art is done by Breakmaster. And, and a live show from Breakmaster at our live show. Oh my gosh. I was behind the scenes. I was almost in tears with joy. It was so cool. Breakmaster Cylinder, we love you. Of course, Jason and Aaron behind the scenes, helping us shoot all this footage, edit all this footage, edit all of our podcasts. We have an amazing crew. And Jared and I, we're so thankful. and to you, the listener. Without you, we are just an MP3 on the internet.

1:14:51And that's not cool. What's cool is you listening to this show. Okay, that's it. This show's done. This live show is done. We'll see you on Friday.

1:15:21Game on.