What is confidence? It's a belief that whatever happens, whatever comes our way - we'll be able to handle it. Either by ourselves or with someone's help.

The world is far from predictable. We never really know what will happen the next moment. Believing otherwise would mean lying to ourselves. Because we don't have control of the outside world. The only thing a person can control is their body and mind. And even that - only to some extent.

The best service providers always sell confidence. Confidence that the room will be clean, confidence that the luggage will get picked up, confidence that the mail will be delivered.

It's the same with Ops service:

We cannot really prevent incidents from happening. Rarely can we promise 5 nines of uptime (it can be done but it's awfully expensive). What we can offer our customers is confidence.

Confidence that whatever incident occurs - it will be taken care of. Confidence that if we can automate a process - we'll put it on our backlog and prioritize it correctly.
That whenever we discover system's new failure mode - we'll create an alert and a remediation for it.

And we need to always remember to convey that confidence. In the way we document our processes. In how we publish our post-mortem analyses. In how we treat customers' tickets and requests. In the way we communicate our plans and yes - even our doubts.

Because when you convey confidence - you share it. You give it to your customer - so they can check one more worry off their list. And like us all - they have a lo-o-o-ng list.

That's how we strive to do business at Otomato - with maximum transparency, integrity and confidence. So our customers can rest assured their software will get delivered and keep running even when nobody's watching. And if anything goes down - we'll bring it back up.

We deliver confidence.