How we built at Rootly

Incidents build great companies.

Picture a person who has never had anything go wrong. They’ve never failed, never shipped a bug, never made a bad call, never had to learn under pressure. You probably wouldn’t look up to that person. The people we admire took real hits, learned fast, and came back sharper.

Organizations are no different. Incidents are an unavoidable—and often necessary—part of running modern systems. Distributed architectures, cloud dependencies, feature velocity, and constant change make “no incidents” an unrealistic goal. The goal is resilience: detect faster, respond better, learn deeply, and continuously improve.

That’s what Rootly believes. We exist to help every organization become more reliable, continuously improve, and inspire confidence in the people who rely on them. Our mission isn’t just what we build—it’s how we build it. The way we design, ship, and operate Rootly reflects principles that keep us focused on impact, especially on our customers’ worst days.

We build for the moment that matters.

When you’re in a SEV0, your system is already complicated. Your toolchain is already noisy. Your attention is already scarce. Every click, every alert, every page load, every missing permission compounds the stress.

So we test features with context in mind. We ask: What if I’m in the middle of an incident right now? Would this be fast enough? Would it reduce friction or add it? Would an on-call engineer understand what to do in five seconds without reading docs? In incidents, seconds count and small choices have outsized consequences.

This perspective drives how Rootly works: we build an incident management platform that fits into the flow of response, not one that pulls teams out of it.

Simple, but powerful—by default.

Great tools don’t feel like tools. They feel like leverage.

We design Rootly to be intuitive and usable out of the box with little to no configuration. That doesn’t mean we oversimplify incident response. It means we focus on the workflows that matter—declaring incidents, coordinating responders, tracking impact, communicating updates, and closing the loop with learning—and we make those workflows fast.

Simplicity also means restraint in the interface. During active response, you need clarity: what’s broken, who’s engaged, what’s the current status, what changed, what’s next. Rootly prioritizes the signal you need in the moment, without distracting extraneous information.

Power comes from clean primitives that compose: automation where it removes toil, structure where it reduces mistakes, and flexibility where teams need to evolve.

Purpose-built beats general-purpose.

A lot of “incident tooling” is a repurposed workflow engine, a generic automation platform, or an add-on bolted onto another part of the stack. That approach usually pushes complexity onto the user: you’re handed a blank canvas and told to build your own incident response operating system.

We’re different. Rootly is purpose-built for incident management. We don’t bloat the platform with features that don’t directly drive our mission. If something doesn’t make response faster, coordination clearer, or learning stronger, we treat it with skepticism.

Purpose-built also means designing for incident-grade realities: high urgency, high concurrency, strict auditability, and the fact that Slack, paging, observability, and ticketing all need to work together in real time.

Opinionated defaults that encode hard-earned lessons.

You shouldn’t need to be an incident response expert to run a clean incident.

Rootly doesn’t chase whatever is most popular. We’ve helped teams manage millions of incidents, and we know what works under pressure. We package those lessons into smart defaults—opinionated settings that help teams adopt best practices immediately, even if they’re still building their reliability muscle.

Smart defaults show up across the platform: incident roles and workflow structure, escalation patterns, communication cadence, and post-incident learning scaffolding. Teams can customize, but they start from a baseline that’s proven in the real world.

Great tools get out of the way.

Incident response already has enough overhead. Tooling should eliminate toil and friction, not contribute to it.

We don’t want you to “go use Rootly.” We want Rootly to show up naturally inside the systems you already live in: Slack, your paging tool, your observability stack, and your task trackers. The best incident platform makes the right action the easiest action—without forcing context switches.

Automation, for us, isn’t about removing humans. It’s about removing the repetitive and failure-prone steps so humans can focus on judgment, coordination, and decision-making.

Keep the garden walls low.

To keep implementation simple, you have to think beyond your own tool.

We prioritize compatibility and deep integration with the broader DevOps ecosystem—observability, ticketing, on-call scheduling, chat, and documentation—so teams can adopt Rootly without ripping out what already works. Low walls make Rootly easier to implement, easier to extend, and easier to trust.

This is also focus: we stay laser-focused on incident management while integrating with the tools that power detection, triage, and follow-through. We don’t try to be everything. We try to be the best place to run incidents.

Reliability is a foundation, not a feature.

Velocity cannot come at the expense of reliability and performance.

Rootly is business-critical. When alerting fails or workflows lag, customers don’t just have a “bad experience”—they lose time in the moments that matter most. That’s why we ship quality-of-life improvements in every development cycle, not just net-new features.

We also invest heavily in resilient infrastructure, including multi-cloud redundancy, because incident tooling should not become a single point of failure during incidents. Reliability isn’t something we talk about. It’s something we operate.

We listen directly, across the whole company.

A deep understanding of the customer experience doesn’t come from dashboards alone.

Everyone at Rootly—engineers, marketers, executives—speaks directly with customers regularly, not just when something goes wrong. We build tight feedback loops because incident response is a lived experience, and the nuance matters.

We make that connection easy by creating a shared Slack channel for every organization that uses Rootly. Customers can engage us in real time, and they can even page our team for urgent issues. That’s not a support tactic—it’s a commitment to being present, accountable, and fast.

We’re our own power users—and we know fit matters.

We don’t want product knowledge trapped inside one team. No matter your role, one of the first things you learn at Rootly is how to demo the product. It builds shared language, improves customer conversations, and keeps us grounded in what the experience feels like for a brand-new user.

We also know Rootly isn’t right for everyone, and that’s okay. Every new customer relationship starts with discovery to make sure teams understand what Rootly is built to do and the operational work it supports. We don’t waste time trying to force-fit the platform as something it isn’t.

The new world of incident response.

Incident response is changing as fast as the technology industry itself. Practices evolve. Expectations rise. Tooling needs to keep up.

As active members of the incident response and reliability community—and stewards of a platform that has supported millions of incidents—we have a front-row seat to the patterns that actually drive better outcomes. We see what teams struggle with. We see what works under pressure. And we build Rootly to move the industry forward: toward faster coordination, clearer ownership, better communication, and stronger learning loops.

Incidents don’t define a company. How you respond to them does.

Rootly exists to help teams respond with confidence, improve with intention, and build systems—and organizations—that get better every time something goes wrong.