← Honeycomb
Honeycomb role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
Honeycomb is an observability tool that helps engineers quickly understand why their software is slow or broken.
Who you'd be calling
Engineering managers, SRE and platform leads, CTOs at software companies, from fast-growing startups to larger firms
Your opener
“Hi Jordan, this is Alex from Honeycomb. I'm calling because teams running lots of services often tell us debugging production takes far too long. Do you have a quick minute to see if that's true for you?”
Problems you solve for them
- Hard to find the root cause of problems in complex, distributed software
- Engineers spend nights on-call guessing what went wrong
- AI and LLM features are hard to monitor and debug
Discovery questions to ask
- When a customer reports something slow, how long does it usually take to find out why?
- How does your team investigate problems that only affect a few users?
- Are you shipping any AI or LLM features, and how do you keep an eye on them?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm busy right now.”
→ No problem, I'll be brief. Is there a better time later this week for a quick 5-minute chat?
“We're not interested.”
→ Fair enough. Can I ask what you use today to debug production issues, so I know if I'm even relevant?
“We already use something for monitoring.”
→ Makes sense, most teams do. Honeycomb often sits beside those to dig into the hard-to-find issues. How well does your current tool handle those?
“Send me an email.”
→ Sure thing. Which would be more useful to you: an example of faster debugging or how teams handle AI monitoring?
Competitors worth knowing
Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Grafana Labs
Interview tips for this company
- The About section names Slack, Intercom and Dropbox as users; you can mention them as public customers, but do not claim details about their usage.
- Practice explaining 'debugging production' in plain words: finding why live software misbehaves for real users.
Written from public information about Honeycomb to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.