PagerDuty Blog

Life at PagerDuty: How PagerDuty Grows Its People

Why I Joined

When I decided to interview at PagerDuty almost two years ago, two things convinced me this was the right fit for me as an Engineering Manager: the people and the product. Since then, PagerDuty has more than doubled in size, and both the people and product have continued to keep me engaged and excited.

Developing Developers

While PagerDuty has endured many changes during its fast growth, its commitment to growing its people has been unwavering. Engineers, with the guidance and approval from their managers, receive the opportunity to attend conferences and trainings critical to their role and their professional development. As a manager, this has greatly accelerated career growth for my team members and in many cases, led to more innovative product solutions. I have also had team members attend trainings for leading Crucial Conversations, growing technical lead skills, and even mindfulness to help them work smarter.

Growing As A Manager

As an engineering manager, it is also important I can scale my skills with my teams and the company. I have greatly benefited from ManagerDuty, a set of in-house developed training sessions for new and experienced managers, but open to all employees. The topics range from feedback conversations to hiring to how to create alignment around goals… all tailored to PagerDuty culture, so I could start applying them immediately.

Thriving As A Team

In addition to individually growing my skills, I believe that companies can only scale successfully if teams as a whole can grow together. In this way, I feel very fortunate to have a great group of engineering management peers around me. From day one, PagerDuty has emphasized the importance of working together, whether it’s as a development team, an engineering management team, or with the senior leadership team. At all levels across all departments, PagerDuty encourages inter-office travel for teams on a monthly basis. For the engineering management team specifically, we do a few team offsites per year where we share our learnings, conduct healthy look-backs and look-forwards, and tackle difficult, shared problems together using our combined experiences. As a result, this has helped us all develop as leaders individually but also as a team. It has also served as a constant reminder that I am never alone; that I’m surrounding by the best group of peer leaders that are willing to share, learn, and grow together with me.

Looking Forward

All in all, PagerDuty has taught me how to hire, coach, speak, manage, and ultimately, become a better leader and person than I could have ever imagined. I have learned more in my two years here than I did in the rest of my jobs combined. As the new year has rolled around and more growth is anticipated, our goals become more ambitious, challenging, and therefore, more exciting. Normally, I would feel nervous about how we would achieve all of them, but we already have new trainings on more advanced topics rolled out. As a result, I have never felt more confident or prepared that we will succeed.

Come join us; we’ve got a tremendous opportunity to help shape the way people run digital businesses.