At incident.io, we deal with small incidents all the time—we auto-create them from PagerDuty on every new error, so we get several of these a day. As a team, we’ve mastered tackling these small incidents since we practice responding to them so often. However, like most companies, we’re less familiar with larger and more severe incidents—like the kind that affect our whole product, or a part of our infrastructure such as our database, or event handling.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “transparency is key” more than you can bear at this point—so let’s get this out of the way. Transparency is key. The phrase suddenly became that much more unbearable. But before you drop off, let me also communicate something else: transparency is often not enough. Often, companies make the mistake of leaning on transparency as a catchall solution to many of their internal comms issues.

For many businesses across the world, incident management is something that’s usually left to engineers. These teams are on the front lines, declaring, managing, and resolving all sorts of incidents across the org, regardless of where it originates or what form it takes. But there’s a glaring issue with this approach. Outside of technical teams, people across organizations aren’t accustomed or trained to use the word “incident” whenever an issue comes up.

Incidents can be a bit noisy. Especially when it’s one of higher severity, there are a lot of moving parts that can make it difficult to come away with the information you want at a glance. And if you’re someone who isn’t necessarily tapped into the day-to-day of incident response, such as a head of a department or executive, you’ll want to be able to glean the most actionable information in just a few seconds without having to dig through dense documents.

If you pick a random SaaS company out of a jar and go to their website, chance are they integrate with another tool. Typically, the end goal of integrations is to meet users in the middle by working with other tools they’re already using on a day-to-day. Put another way, integrations are a strategic business decision. But the question remains: why don’t companies just build a tool with similar functionality in order to make the product stickier?

Having a dedicated incident post-mortem is just as important as having a robust incident response plan. The post-mortem is key to understanding exactly what went wrong, why it happened in the first place, and what you can do to avoid it in the future. It’s an essential document but many organizations either haphazardly put together post-incident notes that live in disparate places or don’t know where to start in creating their own post-mortems.

Put simply, managing incidents—big or small—is good for business. Not only is it a regulatory requirement, but also a factor in your profits. Your customers expect smooth operations, good customer service and protection. A dedicated incident management tool can help protect all of these. While many may think of incidents as an IT or DevOps issue, it’s hard to over emphasize that they can happen in any department.

In this episode, Pete and Lisa discuss why great communication (both internally and externally) is essential to the success of any incident management process. From keeping your wider team in the loop to minimise disruption, to using customer communication to strengthen your brand when things go wrong, the team share their experiences and top tips for having a transparent incident communication culture.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: we’re going into 2023 on a high-note. We’ve closed deals with some of the most respected companies in both the UK and US, we’ve hired in the double-digits, expanded into New York, and revenue is growing steadily. But we aren’t hanging up our football boots just yet. Yes, we can take some time to celebrate our wins, but we’re all hands on deck for 2023 planning.

In this podcast, the three incident.io co-founders Stephen, Chris and Pete take a trip down memory lane, revisiting the story of how they came to found incident.io and the major milestones of the first 12 months in business.