← incident.io
incident.io role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
incident.io helps engineering teams handle on-call, incidents and status pages, with AI to find root causes faster.
Who you'd be calling
Engineering managers, SRE and DevOps leads, VPs of Engineering and CTOs at software companies
Your opener
“Hi Sam, it's Alex from incident.io. I know I'm calling cold. We help engineering teams respond to outages faster and with less chaos, and I wanted to ask how your team handles it when something breaks. Is now an okay time?”
Problems you solve for them
- Outages take too long to resolve and cost money and customer trust
- Incident response is chaotic, spread across chat, calls and docs
- On-call rotations burn out engineers
- Customers get poor communication during outages
Discovery questions to ask
- What happens at your company when a serious outage hits in the middle of the night?
- What tools do you use today for on-call and for managing incidents?
- How do you keep customers informed while you're fixing something?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm swamped right now.”
→ Totally fair, engineers are always busy. I have just one question about how you handle outages. Can I ask it now, or grab five minutes later this week?
“Not interested.”
→ Okay, I appreciate you being direct. Has your team had any rough incidents lately that made the process feel painful?
“We already use PagerDuty.”
→ Lots of teams do. Is it handling the whole incident process for you, or mostly the paging and alerts?
“Send me an email.”
→ Sure. What's the main thing you'd want to see in it: faster response, less on-call pain, or better status updates?
Competitors worth knowing
PagerDuty, Opsgenie, FireHydrant, Rootly
Interview tips for this company
- Learn the basics: what an 'incident', 'on-call' and 'status page' are. Engineers will notice if you can't explain them simply.
- Keep your tone direct and respectful of technical buyers' time. They dislike fluff.
- Be careful with AI claims. Describe 'agentic root cause analysis' as helping engineers find the cause faster, and don't promise more than that.
Written from public information about incident.io to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.