Why the Blameless Mission Matters Today

Blameless was founded over 5 years ago, in a world that looked very different than the world today. We were the first mover in the incident management space, setting the standards for what these tools should achieve. These days, concerns about reliability, incidents, and toil have hit the mainstream. Why have we seen the tech world enter an era where reliability is priority #1? Why do we believe that the Blameless mission matters more today than ever before?

Companies are waking up to the real costs of incidents

We’ve always known that incidents are damaging to the bottom line. Some aspects of the cost are pretty obvious: if your service is down, it can’t make you money. But in the mammoth iceberg of incident costs, the most devastating factors are beneath the surface. Incidents can wreck your brand reputation and make your stock price plummet. They stress out your teams, leading to burnout and rehiring. They delay your planned work, compromising your competitive advantage.

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Want proof that incidents really are this bad? Just look at how tech giants are handling them. Recent high profile outages like Facebook in October 2021 or the Canadian telecom Rogers in July 2022 cost their companies billions of dollars each, with waves of followup costs haunting them for decades to come. We estimate that across all enterprise-sized companies, unreliability and incidents are costing over 100 billion a year.

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Smaller companies may not have outages that make the news, but are even more susceptible to damage from incidents. It’s no wonder that companies of all sizes are making investments in proactively managing incidents and improving reliability. It’s a lot cheaper than waiting for something to break. Check out our Return on Investment calculator to see how much we can save for you.

Software complexity continues to accelerate

There’s only one constant in software development: change. Just as soon as we’d navigated the cloud revolution, or the microservices revolution, or even the social media revolution, we’re gearing up for the AI revolution, the platform revolution, and more.

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These new opportunities inevitably bring new challenges: new failure modes requiring new solutions crop up any time you make a big change. At the same time, customers demand both innovation and continued reliability. If you can’t deliver that, customers are more than happy to switch to a competitor that does. It’s a rock and a hard place to be sure.

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The great thing about Blameless is that we manage things from above the technical layer. Regardless of what new tech is breaking – AI-written code to VR immersion to whatever we can’t yet imagine – we work. We organize you, give you your gameplan, and help you make sense of every bit of data the incident produces. There’s nothing more future-proof than keeping calm, working efficiently, and being ready to learn. Blameless gets you there.

Blamelessness and resilience: our foundation in difficult times

No one needs to tell you that the last five years have been… atypical, to say the least. Everyone has their own list of what global catastrophes and personal tragedies have hit them hardest through the start of the 2020s. But everyone’s list is long.

In response to this time of hardship, many are embracing the idea of resilience. Rather than a futile promise to always be available, resilience empowers us to fail, fail again, fail better, and grow. Resilience engineering builds failure into the process, accepting it as an inevitability and using it as a way to investigate and improve systems. Blameless builds this philosophy into a pillar of the platform, with retrospectives and reliability insights letting you get the most from every incident without adding overhead.

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At the heart of resilience is blamelessness. This is a value we believe in so strongly, we made it our name. When the world was hit by the worst pandemic of our lifetimes, who could we blame? When the economy fell into a slump, where do you point your fingers? We’re not saying there aren’t people at fault, people who dropped the ball, or people who put themselves first selfishly. But what we’ve all learned plenty of times in this last half decade is that we have to be resilient and push forward anyways.

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Individual blame comes at the cost of a perspective that can see systemic failures. We want to empower you to see why things break, not just who broke them. That’s how you can grow stronger every time you fall. That’s Blameless.

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The world won’t change overnight. We’ll still be fighting uphill in plenty of directions. But you can take the biggest step forward in preparing yourself for the challenges of 2024 by trying out Blameless. We’re excited to be your guides to a new era of resilience.

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