In last week’s episode of The Debrief, we had on Colette Alexander, Director of Engineering at HashiCorp, to discuss some of the myths around incident response. In that conversation, one of the myths we spoke about was the idea that asking “why” is better than asking “how.” And how, in reality, asking "how" allows you to focus more on the contributing factors that led to an incident happening, whereas “why” tends to single out a person, which can lead to a lot of blame.

incident.io is the single place to turn when things go wrong. We started with Response to help with coordination and communication. Next, we launched Status Pages to keep internal and external stakeholders up-to-date. And most recently, we added On-call to get the right people in the room when things go wrong.

In this clip, Colette explains why focusing on coming up with a list of action items post-incident is a big mistake. About the episode: What if we told you that everything you thought you knew about incident response was wrong. Well, at least some of it. That some of the things you’ve been doing for years might not actually be having the impact you thought they did. Or, even worse, that some of the assumptions you’ve been making have actually been having a negative impact on you, your team and your organization.

In this clip, Colette explains what the underlying issue is with DORA metrics. About the episode: What if we told you that everything you thought you knew about incident response was wrong. Well, at least some of it. That some of the things you’ve been doing for years might not actually be having the impact you thought they did. Or, even worse, that some of the assumptions you’ve been making have actually been having a negative impact on you, your team and your organization.

Whether you’re a seasoned company with 10+ years of operations, or a startup that’s just getting off the ground, making sure you have a good culture of engineering is really important. Not only will this have a significant impact on the folks on your team, it’ll make a big difference with hiring. When everyone knows that your company is the place to be when it comes to culture, attracting really good talent becomes that much easier.