Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidents.
Meet Herbert Gutierrez, a Technical Support Engineer here at incident.io.
Q: What has been your favorite memory so far?
When I joined, I went to London to meet the team. The company social that week was a scavenger hunt, and I basically got a speedy guided tour of London within two hours. I saw everything I wanted to see, even if it was just a couple of minutes for each landmark. We rode around on e-bikes, looking around for the random stuff on our list.
Q: What is the value that resonates with you the most?
Make it magic. Being in a customer-facing role, you get to experience a lot of the stuff that customers go through on a day-to-day basis. I’m based in California, and one of the things that we want to do is make it seem like the engineering team is out here with me. So, if customers run into blockers or anything like that, my role is to make sure they don’t have to wait until the following day to get a solution to their question or issue. We make it magic for a customer to find solutions for them on the spot.
Q: What is your favorite benefit?
My favorite benefit is the last Friday of the month. My fiancée works in the school system, so she has summers off. This means on those Fridays we can go and explore or do something that we wouldn’t have done previously. We really take that advantage to be able to just go do what we want.
Q: What’s your favorite Slack channel?
It has to be #travels. It’s a channel where the team shares photos and advice for places they’ve recently traveled to. The London team have Europe on their doorstep and I’m yet to explore much of it, so it’s great to hear their recommendations. It was easy to drop a question in there when I was heading to Spain to gather ideas.
Q: What is one piece of advice you would give yourself on your first day?
One piece of advice I’d give myself on the first day would be: relax. Everybody gets nervous, everybody gets overwhelmed. There’s a lot of information that’s thrown at you in the first week. Feeling like you’re overwhelmed after the first couple of days of being here is very normal, we move at a very fast pace. As long as you’re willing to put in the time and the effort, you’ll do great.
Q: What advice would you give to any candidates interviewing with us?
Something I did when I was interviewing is I took about 15 to 20 minutes for myself before the interview. Take time to calm yourself down, to calm your nerves, it really does make a huge difference when you’re walking into an interview in a calm state. Taking a short walk can help give you a clear mental state.
Q: How would you describe the culture in three words?
I’m gonna go to one of our values, it’s three words and describes our culture perfectly: make it magic. Whether it’s something internally or externally, everything and everyone in the company is all about making it magic and seamless.
Q: Who would you want to be stuck in an elevator with?
[Product Engineer] Sam Starling. When I first joined he was one of the first engineers to reach out and while I was in London visiting, he was on Product Responder, so I really got to bond with him, he’s such a great engineer.
Q: What does last Friday of the month mean to you?
Last Friday of the month means I am encouraged to take a little bit of an extra break in the form of a long weekend. It helps you de-stress. Talking to customers every single day is lovely, but you can get overwhelmed. Also, it’s an extra 12 days of leave a year!
Q: What are you most looking forward to with the future of incident.io?
I’m mostly looking forward to the future of us going public. I truly believe in this company and the use case and the product, the team…everything about it since I joined was one of those environments that I was like, ‘I want to be here for the long run and I want to be here when we go public’.
Q: What is something you’re really proud to have worked on?
I’m very proud to have worked on our support process. When I joined incident.io, we didn’t really have a support team, the work was split between multiple people all with different roles. We had Customer Success, Engineers and managers all doing it. Upon joining, we started working on an actual process of support and getting it to where we are now, where it’s a lot more automated. We have a lot more structures in place, to make sure customers have things resolved quickly. We have gone from handling 10 requests a day to about 70 requests. We will have to continue to review and revamp this as we scale.
Q: How do you collaborate with different departments and teams?
As a Technical Support Engineer, my role is to bring visibility to what our customers are seeing, and loop back with the feedback to our Product team. This can be anything from a bug they encounter, a feature request, or something around product knowledge. It’s all about getting a quick turnaround for the customer. With Sales, I’m constantly jumping on calls with them for technical use cases and to showcase knowledge of our product. Additionally with Customer Success, when customers are onboarding, they sometimes need more of a technical walkthrough–that’s where I come in, especially with elements like Catalog that can be quite complex. Being looped into onboarding calls with customers is great because I’ll likely be the one talking to them on a daily basis.
Hey there! I wanted to share a bit about my role with you. I work closely with various teams because a big part of my job involves talking to customers and helping them with technical issues.
Q: What is your favorite customer interaction?
One of my favorite moments was when a customer shared their love for our product, support, and team. It truly solidified my belief in the company and what we do at incident.io.
Q: If you were to join another team for a day, what team would you join and why?
I would love to spend a day with the Design team. Their intuitive approach to product design is fascinating, and I’d love to see their process up close.
Q: How can you see your role developing and growing?
I envision the Technical Support Engineer role expanding to include more involvement in deploying fixes and code changes as our team grows. It’s an exciting evolution I look forward to.
Q: Why do you think companies need a reliable incident management tool?
A reliable incident management tool is crucial for quick issue resolution and bringing visibility to the entire company. It streamlines the process and enhances communication, benefiting both internal teams and customers.
Q: How would you describe the day-to-day of your job?
My day typically starts with team communication, followed by customer calls and project work. I also collaborate with our Sales team, which adds a US-centric perspective to my role.
