Jeli Launches Free Slack Bot To Help With Incident Response
Today we’re delighted to welcome Nora Jones to the show. Nora is CEO&Cp-Founder at Jeli.io, where she leads the development of advanced incident management solutions.
In this interview, we discussed how a high-performant Incident Response slack bot could improve companies’ visibility into the incident management process, the challenge of scaling incident management tooling, the latest Jeli funding round and what keeps investors excited about the company and their product.
Watch&Listen to the full interview here.
Nora, can you let our listeners know a little bit about your background and why you started Jeli?
Jeli.io is an incident management platform where we cover everything from incident response tooling from incident management to resolving and diagnosing it with your customers and employees. So we’re this full-fledged Learning Center, helping you get the most ROI out of an expensive investment that you’ve already made in your incidents.
I worked in a few startups and large enterprises like Netflix and Slack. I was always hired to help teams learn from their incidents. Throughout my career in technology, I noticed that when companies are doing well, they appear in the media a lot, and more people start using their platforms. This is great for business, but the downside is that more and more incidents happen. Some organizations lean into that chaos, learn from incidents, and use them for growth. Others treat an emergency as a bad thing and start investing in a myriad of tools just to prevent incidents. I’ve always been fascinated by that and wanted to build a tool for incident management that was missing in my work.
Nora Jones
CEO&Co-Founder at Jeli
You also are announcing a free slack bot that will help teams coordinate better when dealing with an incident or an emergency and trying to talk in Slack.
At Jeli, we have developed an Incident Response bot geared towards helping the responder to take care of all the coordinative things for you by spinning up the channel and showing you what stage your incident is in. And we give that Incident Response bot for free.
The bot sets the stage for the incident. It shows you if the incident is mitigated or if it’s being diagnosed, worked on, or identified. The beauty of what we provide is the common vernacular that makes it easy for the different groups to understand each other.
Why is Slack itself not the best place to have this communication about the incident?
Slack was not built for incidents or emergency communication. Initially, it was built as a chat app for keeping in touch with your coworkers. It doesn’t make sense that the tech industry tries to fit it as best as possible to the incident management needs.
It is essential to mention that at Jeli, we don’t require you to stay on Slack to be able to use our Incident Response slack bot. We’re not prescriptive about where you must be in an incident because not all communication happens in Slack. We help you in that situation as best we can.
You’re announcing a $ 15 million Series A round – congratulations! That’s a big milestone. Can you give us some insight into why you think investors are excited about Jeli and what the future holds?
Thank you! Investors are excited about our solution because they see large companies like Zendesk and Indeed.com are leveraging our solution for their incident management processes. Also, many smaller companies rely on Jeli to help their growing businesses deliver exceptional experiences to internal teams and customers. The team has been working so hard that raising this investment felt like a natural evolution of our journey.
What do you think sets Jeli.io apart from the competition? What is your competitive edge compared to the rest of the companies out there?
I started Jeli because I was not happy with the existing tooling. A lot of that tooling is basically the same but with different flavours and shapes of the same thing. When you have an incident, buying a tool that claims it will fix everything for you feels good. But a lot of that promise is just not accurate. You buy several tools, but a year later, your incidents look the same and maybe even worse. So now, not only do you have people to keep track of, but you also have an entire tool to manage. And this tool has all these bells and whistles and configurations on it. And you need to train everyone on it. Many of these tools create more coordination costs for people resolving an incident.
At Jeli, we’re taking an honest approach. Our tool takes into account coordination costs, and we’re thinking about the responder (Ed. the valuable individuals who come to the rescue in times of security system trouble). We’re helping companies get a complete sense of what happened in their incidents regarding who they communicated with, who they needed during an incident, whether or not they were on call, and what time of day it was. And using all that information to feed it back into that lifecycle so that they respond better at the moment later.
What lessons can you distill from your experience for women who aspire to build their careers in technology and succeed?
The advice I have for women is to be loud about their work. Many women start their careers and do a brilliant job hoping someone will notice, and they will keep getting promoted, and you will keep getting opportunities. That might not be the case. It would be best if you were vocal about your achievements. Don’t be afraid, and don’t hide it.