LIVE From Denver With Nora Jones!  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: LIVE From Denver With Nora Jones! - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/f40d0127-d98d-4570-bcf1-2cc2976f1031 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Jelly's Origin and PagerDuty Link** - Nora Jones built Jelly because she needed better incident management tools based on her real engineering experiences. - Her integration with PagerDuty was foundational, forming a natural path to acquisition. Transcript: Jerod Santo I'm sure you could do that in 30 seconds. Nora Jones Yeah, absolutely. So I started Jelly in 2019, and prior to that, I had spent my career as an engineer dealing with incidents. I was working at Netflix. I worked at a company called Jet.com which got acquired by Walmart. I worked at Slack for a bit and I was kind of doing similar roles in each of these companies and what I really learned through these companies was the power of post-incident reviews and How they could really rally an organization to drive change and focus on understanding other people in the organization's perspective and what I really started realizing was how Much could be learned from how we speak to each other during incidents. So how we talk to each other in Slack, when there's gaps in communication, who we bring in, why we bring them in, what they're doing. To build more expertise within organizations and really understand where discrepancies and misalignment lie in a productive way. So Jelly was a product that we built based on real problems I was experiencing. It was really a tool I wished I had had in some of those situations. And so that was where it was born. And I'm, you know, very, very nerdy about incidents and that topic and reliability. And, you know, I've been a PagerDuty user my whole career. And so the acquisition came up. It wasn't something I was looking for, but I've, you know, admired PagerDuty, and I actually was like, this could be really good for the industry, actually having these products together And interconnected. So it made sense to me, and yeah, here we are. ([Time 0:04:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aac24658-c8a8-473b-b823-398440b3d634)) - **Founder Vision Aligns with Industry** - Personal gain and industry benefit can align in acquisitions when the goal is wide adoption of valuable tools. - Nora's north star was to get Jelly used broadly, aligning her own success with customer impact. Transcript: Nora Jones Mean, I don't necessarily think those are separate things. Like I mentioned, I built this product because it was something I wished I had had in my jobs. And so that was really like kind of my North Star was getting it out to everyone. And so after the acquisition, seeing the usage of something that I had built, you know, get automatically included in people's toolkits when they start a job was like what I had really Dreamed about. And so I think it was mutually beneficial from that perspective. ([Time 0:08:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/817fe968-7f5a-469f-82c0-6c35e2a15d36)) - **Expand Features to All Plans** - Post-acquisition, expand valuable features to all plan tiers to maximize impact. - Ensure integration aligns with user experience to increase adoption across customer segments. Transcript: Jerod Santo Like is it a tab or is it a subsection or like? Nora Jones Yeah, so it's within PagerDuty. So one of the things, so I spent the first year helping integrate the platform, helping integrate the cultures, right? It's very different bringing a 20-person company to a 1,200 company. And some of these people had never worked at an organization bigger than 30 folks. So, know, there was some adjustment there. And then one of the things I noticed was within PagerDuty's pricing and packaging, there were parts of the incident life cycle that were almost limited to the enterprise plan. And so they immediately put Jelly on the enterprise plan, but I started realizing there's really more of the incident lifecycle that should go downstream to all plans, right? And so I launched that project within PagerDuty, so Jelly is actually available to all plans in PagerDuty right now. ([Time 0:09:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/629b25a6-a3f1-401c-be83-5670b0e6befc)) - **Meeting Customer Needs with Integration** - Customers appreciate integrations that reduce complexity and unify existing tools. - Address previously uninvested areas in platforms to meet long-standing user demands for better incident lifecycle management. Transcript: Nora Jones I mean so when we got acquired, 90% of our customers were PagerDuty's customers. And the very first customer I sold to with Jelly, giant enterprise company, right, which is very rare for startups. And so all of a sudden, most of the companies that were using us were large enterprise companies, which is a lot for a tiny startup. You're kind of trying to act a lot bigger than you are. Someone wants to talk to the salesperson. I'm like, let me go put on this other hat and I will be your salesperson for a second. Ed Chambers? Yeah, exactly. And just actually lost my train of thought. Sorry about that. Adam Stacoviak Good job, Adam. Nora Jones No, no, no. I forgot the question. Well, you were saying putting on different hats. Adam Stacoviak You were going from founder to sales to janitor. Nora Jones Oh, you were asking how customers reacted. Because we shared so many of the same customers, those customers reacted really well. They were already using both of us, so it's like a new integration that will just make it work even better together. Eventually, one piece of paper, no multiple contract cycles. And then I think the other thing is like, you know, PagerDuty was originally created to page folks. And PagerDuty has done a lot more than that over time as well. But I think we were also filling a critical area of the platform that hadn't been invested in much. And so a lot of customers were like, oh, this has been, you know, on our user voice request list for years. And now, you know, it's finally happening. So, yeah, we've had a positive reaction. ([Time 0:12:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8cbb7c91-0cb7-4b43-b486-7502b0d91689)) - **Broader Incident Perspectives Matter** - Moving from engineering to executive roles reveals different perspectives and challenges around incident management. - Cross-organizational communication about incidents is often siloed, missing wider business insights. Transcript: Nora Jones I mean, I've been reflecting on this a lot recently and there's a lot of stages of grief involved in it, too, you know. But I had been an engineer my entire career prior to starting Jelly, and so I actually had grief, you know, from being a CEO and not being in the code, right? Like, I would, you know, want dopamine hits, so I'd go update our marketing site every now and then just to feel like I was doing something, even though I was doing all these different Things. But I also realized part of the reason I started Jelly was after incidents in an organization, a lot of the time, every role is impacted in some way. But also a lot of the time, if there is a post-incident review, it's just done by engineering. And they're not going and talking to marketing or sales or customer support necessarily. Like, it's usually done in a vacuum. Or even executives. And I started realizing, like, as an executive, as a CEO of Jelly, that I had my own sharp end. I had my own area of expertise that like, you know, when I was an engineer, I always kind of felt like, oh, executives don't get it, right? Like, they don't get like, you know, but then when I was an executive, I was like, oh, I didn't get it back then, right? Like, I was able to see a different side of the coin. And so I'm bringing all this up because now I get to be in a new role in a large organization where I've worked at large organizations before, but always as an individual contributor engineer. And so from my perspective, I'm like, oh, I'm like learning another side of this coin. And so it's really interesting to me to have played all these different roles. So that's, you know, kind of where I'm at right now is like, I'm learning a lot, you know, I'm getting to run pricing at a large public company right now. And it's fun, and it's challenging. And I'm just kind of enjoying where I'm at right now and taking it a day at a time. ([Time 0:15:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0c3b8d57-8f9d-4d70-9cef-94bb02dc78cc)) - **Product, Pricing, Growth Integration** - Align product strategy with pricing and growth to create coherent roadmaps and organizational structure. - Use customer insights and data to drive continuous product and pricing evolution. Transcript: Nora Jones So good question. So, um, the role I have is, is head of product strategy and growth. And I think that product strategies should really drive pricing and drive like how you organize yourself, how you ship your product. Uh, and so I'm really helping with like the forwardlooking roadmap along with my colleagues and taking input from them and then leveraging that to drive pricing. So I do have those three different units under me. And I am wearing a lot of hats right now. I am hiring. So if you know anyone, please let me know. And ([Time 0:18:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/151f63f9-e457-4455-a5cf-58a58fb8ff52)) - **AI as Tool for Tedious Tasks** - AI should automate tedious tasks, not replace essential human creative efforts. - Automating scheduling and other routine incident management tasks can greatly improve user experience. Transcript: Nora Jones I mean, I'm thinking about it in a lot of different ways right now. I think every single company in the world right now is trying to figure out how to use AI, how to develop policies around it. And, you know, for B2B SaaS companies, they're trying to figure out how to monetize it. Yeah. And everyone's in the early days of it, but also everyone's kind of going through that because that's how the market is reacting, right? It's there's expectations around that. I think especially within software reliability, you know, my take is on focusing on when the agents fail, because that will be the case. And, you know, pager duty has been the one that you call in those situations. And so where my head's at right now is how do we keep being that for folks, even in this new age? And how do we help them with the parts of pager duty that are tedious or annoying? So for example, we're developing a shift agent that takes care of your schedules for you, because I know that is the largest complaint. Adam Stacoviak Beautiful. I love that. Nora Jones Yeah. So shift agent. Yeah. Shift agent. So it's like things like that. You know, I, I, I'm not a huge fan of, of AI that I feel like takes away the necessary human tasks, but it's like the, the things that feel tedious or boring. ([Time 0:21:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/aeb39541-d639-46d3-b2a3-2ad575b12226)) - **Complexity of Novel Incidents** - Novel incidents will grow in complexity, especially involving AI-driven systems. - Human expertise remains essential for understanding unprecedented failures and guiding incident responses. Transcript: Nora Jones Yeah. I mean, we are going to have incidents that we have no idea how to predict right now, and they are going to involve things that no one internally wrote and so we also have to figure out how To debug them and I think that is going to be challenging I think the level of incidents we have are going to reach this rate where they're very challenging for a little bit we're going To understand them a little bit more and it's going to normalize, but I don't think we've hit that point yet, right? So I think we're all kind of like bracing ourself for it. I even saw someone was using, I think it was Replit and they deleted, Replit deleted the entire code base during an incident. It was like a new, and the agents apologizing, like, oh yeah, sorry, I really shouldn't have done that. Adam Stacoviak That's bad. That's normally when you would fire somebody. That's straight up out of Silicon Valley, okay? Season six, that happened. The TV show. Nora Jones Yeah. Jerod Santo So when we were in Seattle, when was that, May? Yeah, May. For Microsoft Build. There was a, I don't know if it was a demo or a video. There were some claims that I didn't substantiate one way or the other, that they had agents on standby to resolve your incidents for you, or at least to do the first level of triage on An incident so that that pager goes off maybe later, maybe not at all. And I thought that seems really awesome. Like I would not, it would be nice if nobody was on pager duty. Like that's a world that we all appreciate. It's not a reality yet, but they're starting to be people saying that that kind of stuff is going on from your purview inside PagerDuty. Is that going on? Are there agents doing that kind of stuff? Nora Jones Yeah, and I will caveat this, and just to put it simply, I think there's a few different types of incidents, right? There's the well-understood, which are probably not even incidents anymore, And I'm sure all of us have worked at organizations where someone is urgently doing or fixing something That they've probably fixed before. And maybe there could be more automation around it. Right. And so that's where I think AI could really help is like those, those interrupts that, you know, and we've all seen it. We've all worked with someone where you're like, why are you still spending your time doing that, right? Like there's better things for us to be doing right now. And so I think that's where AI can really help. And then I think there's partially understood incidents where it's like, this kind of feels familiar, but not totally. I think AI can maybe assist there, but it shouldn't take the wheel. And then with the new and novel ones, like I was talking about, that needs to be pretty human driven. And 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. ([Time 0:26:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7feabed3-3c43-4390-9407-8bde3d159c2e)) - **Incidents from Misused Technologies** - Nora recalls incidents where technology was pushed beyond intended use, complicating resolution. - Many original designers leave, leaving teams to decipher intentions during crises. Transcript: Nora Jones Recent? Jerod Santo No, just whenever. Nora Jones 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, you know, like 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. 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. Uh, and a lot of the time it's because we implemented them without having deep subject matter expertise in them. Uh, 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. And 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. ([Time 0:31:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/690e0ec5-aeb4-431c-a65b-3831bc8a8399)) - **Integrating Acquisitions Takes Time** - Start with small integration steps, such as consolidating apps. - Anticipate complexities in integrating products and pricing within large organizations. Transcript: Nora Jones So when I joined PagerDuty, we had like two main product orgs. We had incident management and then we had another product org that was doing automation and AI. And it was like kind of focusing on other use cases. So like CS users or, um, FinOps, you know? Uh, so we obviously went into the incident management organization. Um, there was, you know, no team around post incident reviews. Um, and they did have an integration team that was in charge of a bunch of different integrations. So like service now, um, data dog, uh, that team was also in charge of the Slack integration, but it had been very underinvested 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. And so the very first task we had to do was, you know, we were obviously selling Jelly standalone 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 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. 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. So 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. ([Time 0:32:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bbf9da77-4e0b-4372-b1df-e9745b5fd51c)) - **Data-Driven Customer Engagement** - Use data patterns to target outreach and improve customer relationships at scale. - Encourage customers to leverage the full incident lifecycle for maximum value. Transcript: Nora Jones Mean, yeah, we have way more customers, right? At Jelly, I had personal phone numbers of all of our customers, right? That's not able to be the case at PagerDuty. And so I also have to, 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. You 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, not, that's not a great use of time. Like that would actually be a good use of AI. So, you know, I'll, 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. If 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. ([Time 0:36:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5bcb6818-ed04-4642-989a-572d4d34799f)) - **AI Speeds but Demands Caution** - AI accelerates product development by streamlining initial ideation and visualization. - Overdependence on AI risks misapplication and loss of human judgment. Transcript: Nora Jones What would the product? Jerod Santo 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 yeah so that drives product we were actually joking about it last night at the meet up 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 gonna how are You gonna 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 product roadmaps, right? Like if that wasn't something you had to think about, 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? Nora Jones I 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. But what I have found AI useful and is not just driving the product roadmap, it's 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 made us faster. Like I think we would be slower. Sure. I would certainly be slower without it. Jerod Santo I think in terms of- Just like Air Jordans. I mean, you run faster with the nice Jordans. What's that? I was just, I was making a joke. It was bad. You run faster if you have Jordans. Nora Jones Yes. Yeah, exactly. Sorry. So, but yeah, in terms of the product roadmap, like, you know, I don't think there's never going to be a world where we have zero incidents. And so I think those are some of the wrong problems to go after with AI, is trying to get to 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. I 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, right? 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. ([Time 0:39:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2329f69-0cd6-4ffd-841f-949d27f967be)) - **AI and Subject Matter Expertise** - AI can map and enhance subject matter expertise across organizations through communication analysis. - Risks include hallucinations and humans losing trust in their judgment. Transcript: Nora Jones 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. And 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 seeing? And I also think that humans could stop trusting their own judgment sometimes. 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, you know, we all have that personal responsibility. But it's also, you know, it's going to change the way we talk to each other. Like, I think a lot about the language aspects of it. ([Time 0:43:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/21d4d1cb-911d-424d-a723-7bc9b1ac2339)) - **Strategic Hiring Based on Team Needs** - Hiring should complement existing team skills to build balanced expertise. - Understand individual strengths and gaps to form effective teams. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak It might be to learn more about your team. Nora Jones 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. And so I do think that that could be helpful in terms of just creating teams that work really well together and looking at where someone's strength is. Like I have someone on the pricing team that like loves to go into the data right like data expert but is not as like 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. And so, you know, but I know that just because I interact with my team a lot. ([Time 0:46:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/628abb75-965f-4615-b9c3-1fb3280b4545)) - **Learning from Incidents Effectively** - After severe incidents, organizations should focus on ‘how’ not ‘why’ to learn more effectively. - Organizational discussions prevent automation mistakes and improve incident preparedness. Transcript: Nora Jones Yeah, it's a good question. And 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 like issues to your point and so I've been a big believer in that for a while when we were at Jelly 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. And, 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, you might not need an action item at the end of it. It doesn't mean that you didn't learn from it, but the action that you take might be understanding your system more. And 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. ([Time 1:00:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ee8eccd-beec-46c5-a3e9-f9a75772d897)) - **Integrate and Facilitate Communication** - Connect PagerDuty with other tools for holistic incident management and signal prioritization. - Facilitate cross-team communication to avoid siloed knowledge and improve post-incident learning. Transcript: Nora Jones 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? Adam Stacoviak Yeah, because these things are hard. And how do you help leverage making that easier? Nora Jones 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 we do, 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. That'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, you know, 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. Adam Stacoviak Do you see that as a good way to interact or get that information to the parts outside of just the engineering and expose that understanding. Nora Jones Yeah. Adam Stacoviak So, um, so you restate that question, please. Yeah. Nora Jones 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. And 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 Hub 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? And 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. ([Time 1:06:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7d592ac2-deb2-45d8-b97b-3077de9e97ca)) - **Early Reliability Lessons** - Nora started her reliability career in hardware, facing high stakes for failures. - Netflix's Chaos Engineering and aviation human error guides deeply influenced her approach. Transcript: Nora Jones You know, I really started, I actually started my career in hardware. I studied computer engineering and I went directly to a home security and like smart home company. It's terrifying having that as your first job as like a reliability person because if you mess up someone's house might get robbed so that was that was stressful and then I saw this job Opening at an e-commerce company for a software engineer and I you know that's not that wasn't technically my role right I was doing less web development and doing more hardware. Um, but I looked at some of the traits that were needed. Um, it was like a developer productivity and reliability role. And I was like, you know, I, I do a bunch of this now. And so I just applied, uh, and I joined the org and, um, they were having incidents multiple times a day, every day. Um, The 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 in and out of it. It was bananas. And I was really trying to get creative. 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. It'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, you know, I find it very fascinating and it is relevant a lot of the time too. ([Time 1:10:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2e4bb1f-54f9-49ea-af11-01cab14ee342))