Product Roundup: New Blameless Features in June 2022

Summer means things are heating up. And things are definitely heating up at Blameless! We’ve been hard at work delivering new features and capabilities to our customers, so today I wanted to share a quick summary of all the latest. Here are 4 exciting product updates that enhance the way teams manage incidents and deliver reliable products to their customers.

Check-mark a task complete, even if you’re not the assignee

It’s always important to know your to-do’s, and task assignments help everyone stay aligned. This is especially true in critical situations like responding to customer-facing incidents. At the same time, task assignments aren’t necessarily hard and fast rules. Let’s say you’re assigned a task to check logs for occurrence of < term >, but you get pulled away halfway through and ask your colleague to help finish the job. Situations like this happen every day. That’s why Blameless allows you to authorize users to check-mark a task complete, even if they’re not the task assignee. Previously, only the assignee of a task could do this, and now teams can continue along a seamless workflow. 

‍

Save messages as templates in the CommsFlow Editor

No two incidents are the exact same. Communications, on the other hand, often follow similar patterns. You likely sign off emails with the same first and last name, right? (I mean, I would hope so.) Good news! It’s easy to save standard messages as templates in the CommsFlow editor. You can even save multiple templates and preconfigure each as the default message for different Flows. Navigate to any “Flow” and create your message. Then click the “Template” button to save your message for future use.

‍

‍

What’s great is that even when you select a template message for your comms, you still have the option to edit the text in real-time before publishing and sending. Or maybe you decide to write a message from scratch and then you realize you want to save it as a template. No problem. Save the draft you’re currently editing as a brand new template by clicking on the “Template” button and selecting the “Save Template” option.

‍

‍

‍

Another game changer we introduced in CommsFlow is the ability to insert “variables” into your text. No need to copy and paste Blameless metadata into your messages. You can insert variables like Incident Type, Incident Severity, and Incident Status into your message, and Blameless will fill in the blanks for you. Work smarter, not harder. Who’s with me!

‍

Select options for custom Jira fields from within the Blameless UI

If you need to create a Jira task, you can easily do that in the Blameless UI. You can also do that with the Blameless bot via Slack. Even if you have custom fields set up in Jira, Blameless knows about it. Blameless will auto-populate array options for those custom fields, making it a whole lot easier to project manage without constantly switching between tools. Additionally, if the required Jira field is a text field, you can insert Blameless metadata. This includes incident information such as the ID, title, description, creator, creation date, status and severity. All tools are updated and all teams stay in sync.

‍

​​

‍

‍

Assign ownership of the retrospective (postmortem) to anyone

Meaningful retrospectives are important to reliability teams because they accelerate learning. Anyone can contribute to a retrospective, including teams like customer success and support. In fact, there are cases when incidents are identified through these teams. Sometimes, it makes sense to give ownership of the retrospective to someone outside of the immediate incident response team. With Blameless you can assign ownership of the retrospective to any user in your Slack workspace. All you have to do is instruct the Blameless bot to edit the settings of the retrospective, straight from your incident Slack channel.

‍

We enjoy helping teams invest in product reliability by advancing their incident management. These new updates were built to help you do just that. If you’re a customer and have questions about what’s new, feel free to reach out at support@blameless.com. If you’re new to Blameless, and you’d like to hear more about our product, schedule a meeting with one of our technical experts. There are many more announcements coming soon at Blameless, so stay tuned. You can follow us on Twitter to stay updated on the latest. We’re excited and hope you are too! 

‍