Today I’m really excited to share the new look of our blog.
Spike has had this blog for a while. Early on, it was just me and I wrote about the decisions I was making as we built Spike. Then we slowly started growing and wrote about incidents, response, escalations, on-calls and even many guides. It’s safe to say now that we are doubling down on this space!
With the new design, we have intentionally kept it minimal and put the content first. Honestly, designing a blog turned out to be harder different than designing the product. There’s so much text and almost no UI to work with, so the whole craft is in the restraint because you can go crazy just choosing the right font 🙂
Previously, we had a default theme all our content shipped with. This time though, we built our own theme rather than reaching for something off the shelf. After a full week of building / prompting to add small touches, I think we are happy with what we have got. You won’t notice the smaller touches one by one, but you’ll feel them together as you visit more.
Doubling down on sharing
AI is running fast and it’s reshaping what incident response even looks like. After nearly five years in this industry, we’ve learned a lot as a team, and as a bootstrapped one we’ve learned some of it the hard way.
There is so much we have wanted to share and never had the space for sharing things like
- How we built our on-call engine
- How we do customer support
- What we believe about hiring and what the right team for Spike looks like.
- How we do customer demos and for which we’re grateful to have done so much of, even though the first calls were genuinely bad.
The team entirely came from engineering backgrounds, so naturally we got plenty of our product intuitions course-corrected and faced things we never saw coming. I think all of this is worth writing down!
Spike isn’t used only by software companies, so we’ve picked up how incident response actually runs in places like logistics, hardware, media, ISPs, etc and there’s much to share there. Lastly, I will personally double down on sharing experiences of building Spike. I will write more along with the whole team about how we’re building the product and the thinking behind it. I’ll document our journey and how we reason through decisions along the way. If it helps other product folks, then that’s a huge win for us!
What this space is for
1. Incident response. Our guides, plus our read on how the industry is shifting. AI is moving fast and the shape of incident response is changing with it, so we’ll write about where things are heading. We also want to have honest conversations with experts, across software and outside it, about how they actually run incident response.
2. Building Spike. How we decided on our roadmap, the key calls we make, and the reasoning behind them. This is also where we’ll introduce the team more often, and talk about how we hire (slowly!) and how roles are shifting as we grow. Like many right now, we’re figuring out how engineering, product, and design are all changing under our feet. This is where we share “the inside stories”
A lot of people and blogs shaped this. Thanks to Sreekar, Nivedha from Project Inside Out, and Nikhil Shrivastava for the inspiration, pointers and for building us this space. We also studied blogs we admire: Buffer, Wistia, Basecamp, Anthropic, and First Round Review.
Feedback is 100% welcome. Reach out to us on [email protected], X / Twitter, or LinkedIn
Thank you for reading, Have a great day.
