← New Relic
New Relic role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
New Relic is a platform that shows engineers how their software is running, so they can find and fix problems fast.
Who you'd be calling
VP/Director of Engineering, DevOps or SRE leads, Platform Engineering managers at mid-size to large software-driven companies
Your opener
“Hi Sam, this is Alex from New Relic. I know I'm calling out of the blue, got 30 seconds to tell you why I called and you can decide if it's worth continuing?”
Problems you solve for them
- Engineers waste hours hunting for the cause of outages across many tools
- Downtime and slow apps lose customers and revenue
- Monitoring tools are scattered and costs are hard to predict
Discovery questions to ask
- When something breaks in production, how does your team find the cause today?
- How many different monitoring tools are your engineers jumping between?
- How much time would you say on-call engineers lose to chasing alerts?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm busy right now.”
→ Totally fair, I'll be quick. Would it be better if I grabbed 2 minutes on Thursday morning instead?
“We're not interested.”
→ Understood, I don't expect you to be yet. Out of curiosity, is slow incident response not a problem for your team, or is it just handled?
“We already use Datadog (or another monitoring tool).”
→ Good, that means you take reliability seriously. Many teams we talk to use more than one tool and want to cut that down. Is that something you're looking at?
“Just send me an email.”
→ Happy to. So I send something useful, what's the biggest headache for your team right now: outages, alert noise or tool costs?
Competitors worth knowing
Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana Labs
Interview tips for this company
- Learn the word 'observability': seeing what is happening inside software using logs, metrics and traces.
- Know that New Relic sells to engineers, so sound curious and practical, not salesy; admit what you don't know.
Written from public information about New Relic to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.