How Wealthsimple uses Rootly to create a culture of wellness and psychological safety for incident commanders.

Major market events exposed the limits of ad hoc incident response

In early 2021, events like the meme stock surge drove high-traffic periods that put heavy stress on Wealthsimple’s systems. That made reliability and availability feel even more critical, especially for a financial services company serving customers during market-moving moments. At the time, PagerDuty handled alerting and paging, but incident coordination itself was still happening in ad hoc Slack channels. Wealthsimple wanted a stronger source of truth for every incident and potential incident.  

The team began building automation around its manual process, but quickly ran into the familiar build-versus-buy decision. Wealthsimple concluded that building to the standard it wanted would require significant time and investment, plus ongoing maintenance afterward.  

“We hit a point where ad hoc Slack coordination and partial automation were no longer enough. We needed a real incident management system that could hold up during the moments our customers needed us most.” — Chris Inch, Director of Engineering

Wealthsimple needed more than tooling. It needed a system that could grow with the company.

When evaluating options, Wealthsimple looked at expanding its use of PagerDuty, using incident response features in tools like Datadog, and dedicated platforms including Rootly, FireHydrant, and incident.io. According to the public case study, Rootly ultimately stood out because it best met Wealthsimple’s feature requirements while giving the team the flexibility it needed as a high-growth company.  

That flexibility mattered for two reasons. First, Wealthsimple wanted incident tooling that could evolve alongside the company. Second, it wanted support not just for response mechanics, but for the culture around incident response. Chris specifically calls out Rootly’s responsiveness and domain expertise as helpful in guiding the process as Wealthsimple’s incident program evolved.  

“We weren’t just looking for feature coverage. We wanted a platform and partner that could grow with us as our process became more mature.” — Chris Inch, Director of Engineering

Rootly helped Wealthsimple design incident response around wellness, not burnout

This is the most distinctive part of the Wealthsimple story. The company explicitly prioritized employee wellness and long-term sustainability in its incident response design. Rather than repeatedly relying on the same highly capable responders, Wealthsimple wanted to make incident command accessible to a broader set of employees so the burden could be shared more fairly and so more people could grow through the experience.

Rootly supported that goal by automating much of the in-the-moment “hand-holding” needed for someone running an incident for the first time. Instead of expecting deep system knowledge up front, Wealthsimple could rely on automation, prompts, and guided workflows to help new incident commanders navigate the process in Slack. That created more psychological safety for responders and made incident command feel more learnable.  

“One of the biggest wins with Rootly is that it lowers the barrier to running an incident well. That gives people more confidence and lets us design for sustainability instead of over-relying on the same few experts.” — Chris Inch, Director of Engineering

Training moved out of slide decks and into the incident workflow itself

Before Rootly, Wealthsimple relied heavily on training materials to prepare incident commanders. As Rootly was implemented, the team translated that time-consuming training into the process itself. Instead of requiring hours of videos and Google Meets, new commanders could learn directly in Slack. Wealthsimple even used Rootly’s /incident test command to create an interactive built-in tutorial that walks people through running an incident.  

That is a strong product story because it shows Rootly doing more than automating admin. It turned incident management into an embedded learning system. Wealthsimple also encourages everyone to run a test incident when their on-call shift starts so they feel ready if a real incident occurs.  

This change had an operational payoff: because incident command became easier to learn and safer to practice, Wealthsimple says it can now support a large pool of about 60 to 70 incident commanders, each taking very short shifts only once every couple of months. The company explicitly frames that as a way to minimize on-call burden and better support employee wellbeing.  

“By building guidance directly into Slack, we made incident command much easier to learn. That let us expand the bench dramatically and reduce the burden on any one person.” — Chris Inch, Director of Engineering

Better visibility helped frontline teams serve customers with more confidence

Wealthsimple’s story is also notable because it extends beyond engineering. The Client Success team remains involved in any incident that affects customers, and Rootly helps ensure those frontline teams get the visibility they need. The case study specifically mentions automated reminders for actions like updating the status page directly from Slack.  

That matters in high-pressure incidents, where technical responders are often focused on diagnosis and mitigation while non-technical teams need timely, credible updates for customers. Wealthsimple says Rootly’s automations make it easier to keep those teams informed, which in turn helps them manage customer conversations with more confidence.  

Rootly gave Wealthsimple a more scalable operating model for incident response

At a high level, Wealthsimple’s transformation was not just from manual to automated. It was from expert-heavy incident response to a broader, healthier, more scalable model. The company moved away from ad hoc Slack coordination and hours of separate training toward a system where people can learn inside the workflow, practice safely, share the load across a larger group, and still keep customer-facing teams informed.  

That makes this case study especially strong because the outcome is not only operational efficiency. It is a reliability culture designed around psychological safety, employee wellbeing, and sustainable growth.  

Quick fire round: Wealthsimple rates Rootly

• 5/5: Implementation flexibility
• 4.5/5: Cross-functional visibility
• 5/5: Workflow automation
  
• 5/5: Training and onboarding
• 5/5: Commander wellness impact

Wealthsimple’s  story emphasizes Rootly’s flexibility, guided automation, in-Slack training, status page updates, support for Client Success, and a healthier incident commander model with a large shared bench and short rotations. Those are strong signals of value beyond basic incident tooling.