Cory Watson on 9/6/2024, 5:32:00 PMBeing on-call sucks. Managing on-call sucks. We're here to make it better.
On-call is the junk drawer of operations. You know, that one drawer in the house that gets loaded up with all the random things that no one seems to know where else to put? All the surprises land in it: customer-angering outages, maintenance, and, well, who even knows? If we knew, it wouldn’t land in the junk drawer! Worse, as we stretch this analogy, it’s a junk drawer with a schedule where a random person is tasked months in advance to figure it out somehow to make it, well, less junky.
Oh, and you need to be ready to investigate every alert that goes bump in the night, 24/7 for a week. You and your family base your plans on this duty, and changing the schedule - even when something predictable and easily accounted for, like a dentist appointment - can feel like untying and retying a Gordian knot.
Did we mention that every team in the organization tends to do all of this a little differently as well?
What are we doing?
Our team has years of experience building and running software systems. We've been on a lot of on-call schedules, so we knew there was a better way. We identified the pain points – schedule management, noise, fatigue, toilsome process – and paired them with the best practices developed across our careers and our research to create a tool that allows every team to have provably amazing on-call across your entire organization. (Yes, we even measure stuff!)
How are we doing this? We've spent decades on-call, building operational tools and running teams across name-drop-worthy places like Amazon, NASA, Stripe, and Twitter. We looked far and wide for learnings from resilience engineering, cognitive systems engineering, and organizational management to develop organization-wide on-call programs instead of single-team approaches to easily share expertise and capacity when you need it most. For the last year, we've been developing a product that automates these practices so any organization, big or small, can have a world-class on-call program with off-the-shelf ease.
Our smart scheduler and automated handoff are just the beginning. In the coming months, we will share more operational advancements that improve on-call and day-to-day systems operations. Stay tuned!
We need you!
If this all sounds rad and interesting to you, and you want to see it for yourself, reach out! Big company or small, we can work with your existing tools and even keep everything zero-risk on your end.
If you are getting your first on-call program set up, we can make starting on the right foot easy. You can also follow our work on this blog or keep up with our changelog until we show so much cool stuff you just have to check it out.
In the coming years, we’re going to regale you with lots of content that hopefully does great on Hacker News by pointing out the lessons we’ve learned from our work on socio-technical change at tech companies, how other industries handle these kinds of issues, and our deep respect for academic work like cognitive systems engineering and complex systems theory. That’s not today’s post, though. Today’s post asks you to join our waitlist, see a demo, and hopefully join us on this journey.