Due to an incident on our main datastore, we react and spent an entire week trying to keep Intercom up, with the help of 20 engineers from other teams. During this tough week, we had obliged to drop any other projects and focus on building a firefighting organization.
After the urgency period, it became evident to us that we need to focus on reactive work to prevent the incident from happening again. It was the launch-pad for the conception of a brand-new organization for our team, focusing on ownership and high impact work.
Few months after, results ruled in favour of our hard work: we’ve reduced system interruptions by more than 80% ! But good news and radical changes also come with consequences: we need to deal with multiple implications and drastically change our way to work as a team.
During this talk we will cover:
- our journey from a firefighting to a proactive work organization
- good and bad organizational decisions we made
- impacts on the morale of the team
