In the heat of an incident, having a clear and shared understanding of what’s going on is absolutely crucial to effective response. But often what actually happens is that people involved in incidents build their own picture and narrative of the event, shaped by their own expertise, their past experiences, and what they’re seeing and hearing as the incident develops. The pictures and perspective people build is often referred to as a mental model.

One of the most painful parts of incident response is contextualizing the problem and understanding how and where it fits within your organization. If responders are unable to answer basic questions such as: Then you waste valuable time talking to the wrong people or solving the wrong problems — ultimately extending impact and hurting your response. It’s a common issue that, up until now, didn’t have a clear solution or workaround.

We recently introduced Catalog: the connected map of everything in your organization. In the process of building Catalog as a feature, we’ve also been building out the content of our own catalog. We'd flipped on the feature flag to give ourselves early access, and as we went along, we used this to test out the various features that Catalog powers.

As you may have already seen, we’ve recently released a Catalog feature at incident.io. While designing and building it, we took an approach that’s a tangible departure from a traditional service catalog. Here’s how we’re different, and why.

Here's what you can expect to learn from this article: Raise your hand if you like shipping changes quickly. (Yes, let's assume that everything you're shipping has value and isn't a vanity project). Chances are, you, the person reading this now, agreed with the above. When you start on a project, big or small, you want to keep any changes moving along and avoid getting stuck. The less time between the beginning and end of a project, the faster you can shift your focus to other things.