Episode 3: Spotify and A Year of Incidents

The VOID

If you or anyone you know has listened to Spotify, you're likely familiar with their year end Wrapped tradition. You get a viral, shareable little summary of your favorite songs, albums and artists from the year. In this episode, I chat with Clint Byrum, an engineer whose team helps keep Spotify for Artists running, which in turn keeps well, Spotify running.
Each year, the team looks back at the incidents they've had in their own form of Wrapped. They tested hypotheses with incident data that they've collected, found some interesting results and patterns, and helped push their team and larger organization to better understand what they can learn from incidents and how they can make their systems better support artists on their platform.
We discussed:

• Metrics, both good and bad
• Moving away from MTTR after they found it to be unreliable
• How incident analysis is akin to archeology
• Getting managers/executives interested in incident reviews
• The value of studying near misses along with actual incidents