← PagerDuty
PagerDuty role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
A platform that alerts the right engineers when systems break and helps them fix incidents fast.
Who you'd be calling
VPs and Directors of Engineering, IT Operations, SRE and DevOps leads at mid-size and large companies running online services.
Your opener
“Hi [Name], this is [You] from PagerDuty. I know I'm calling out of the blue. I talk to engineering and IT leaders about what happens in the first few minutes after a system goes down. Do you have a minute to tell me how your team handles that today?”
Problems you solve for them
- Outages that cost money and customer trust
- Engineers drowning in noisy alerts
- Slow, messy response when something breaks at 2 a.m.
Discovery questions to ask
- When a critical system goes down, how does your team find out and who gets notified?
- How often does your on-call team get alerts that turn out to be noise?
- How long does it usually take to resolve a serious incident?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm busy right now.”
→ Completely understand. I'll keep it to one question: how does your team get alerted when something breaks? Can I ask that?
“Not interested.”
→ No problem. Most teams only think about this after an outage. Has your team had a rough incident recently?
“We already have something for alerts.”
→ Good, so you take this seriously. How well does it handle on-call schedules and cut down noisy alerts? That's where teams often tell us they want more.
“Just send me an email.”
→ Happy to. Who runs on-call or incident response on your team? I'll send something short for them and follow up next week.
Competitors worth knowing
Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Splunk On-Call, incident.io
Interview tips for this company
- Learn the terms 'incident', 'on-call' and 'downtime' in simple language, and think of a real outage you've seen in the news.
- Pain here is urgent and costly, so practice talking about the cost of downtime without exaggerating or inventing numbers.
- PagerDuty talks a lot about AI. Read its homepage so you can mention it naturally.
Written from public information about PagerDuty to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.