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Tag: PagerDuty

  • PageDuty CEO Apologies for Martin Luther King Jr. Quote in Layoff Email

    PageDuty CEO Apologies for Martin Luther King Jr. Quote in Layoff Email

    PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada has apologized to employees for a cringe-worthy layoff email in which she quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

    In late January, Tejada sent an email announcing layoffs for roughly 7% of the company’s staff. Throughout the lengthy email, Tejada showed remarkable tone-deafness and spent much of the email cheerleading for the company’s accomplishments and patting leadership on the back — not a good look when announcing layoffs. The worse part, however, was quoting Dr. King at the height of back-patting the company’s leadership.

    After predictably swift backlash, it appears Tejada has received the message loud and clear. The CEO posted an apology to employees, which is displayed below in its entirety:

    Team,

    This has been a difficult week for our company. For those of you who were not able to attend our town hall discussion today, I wanted to share what we discussed. The way I communicated layoffs distracted from our number one priority: showing care for the employees we laid off, and demonstrating the grace, respect, and appreciation they and all of you deserve.

    There are a number of things I would do differently if I could. The quote I included from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was inappropriate and insensitive. I should have been more upfront about the layoffs in the email, more thoughtful about my tone, and more concise. I am sorry.

    Many of you have reached out to me this week with feedback, questions and support – thank you.

    Jenn

  • PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. in Cringe-Worthy Layoff Email

    PagerDuty CEO Quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. in Cringe-Worthy Layoff Email

    PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada has set the bar for the most cringe-worthy way of laying off employees.

    Like many tech companies, PageDuty is laying off part of its staff to better survive the economic downturn. Tejada informed employees in an email, the contents of which were posted on the company’s site.

    In her email, the CEO said the company will be laying off “roughly 7% of roles globally, the vast majority of which are in North America, primarily in our go-to-market and G&A organizations.”

    Tejada then goes on to explain why the layoffs are necessary, as they’re designed to help the company better support other business ventures, something the laid-off employees probably don’t care about and would have been better left to another email:

    Decisions were predicated on business rationale that included, for example, protecting investments in top product development priorities like our new Incident Workflows, self service and product-led growth (PLG), and continued AIOps and Automation enhancements, improving spans of control and streamlining management layers, expanding teams and roles in Santiago and Lisbon, and addressing our enterprise opportunity with a hybrid strategic and high-velocity GTM motion that continues to improve our productivity

    The coup de grâce, however, was quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in an effort to make herself, the company, and its leadership look better:

    None of this would be possible without you, our leadership, and our board — thank you for your grit and resilience, your commitment to our customers and your support of our values and people. I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.” PagerDuty is a leader that stands behind its customers, its values, and our vision — for an equitable world where we transform critical work so all teams can delight their customers and build trust.

    Interestingly, while Tejada says the company ‘stands behind its customers, its values, and its vision,’ its interesting that she didn’t say it stands behind its employees.

    Predictably, Tejada quoting Dr. King has not gone over well, with the CEO receiving widespread criticism.

    While PagerDuty is well within its rights to lay off employees, and may even need to, Tejada would do well to not quote Dr. King in an effort to make such a decision — one that negatively impacts so many lives — look better. Nor should Dr. King’s words be used to pat herself and the company’s leadership on the back at a time when her employees will be paying the price for that leadership’s miscalculations.

  • Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences, Says PagerDuty CEO

    Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences, Says PagerDuty CEO

    PagerDuty began trading on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time this morning and is now trading at more than 60% above their IPO price of $24. That gives the company a market capitalization of more than $2.7 billion. PagerDuty offers a SAAS platform that monitors IT performance. The company had sales of $118 million for its last fiscal year, up close to 50% over the previous year.

    The company uses machine learning to inform companies in real-time about technical issues. “Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time,” says PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. “PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.”

    Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, discusses their IPO and how machine learning should be used to deliver great brand experiences in an interview on CNBC:

    It’s Gotten Harder for Human’s to Manage the Entire IT Ecosystem

    If you think about the world today, it’s an always-on world. We as consumers expect every experience to be perfect. Every time you wake up in the morning, you order your coffee online, you check Slack to communicate with your team, and maybe you take a Lyft into work. Sitting behind all of that is a lot of complexity, many digital and infrastructure based platforms, that don’t always work together the way you’d expect them to. As that complexity has proliferated over the years and because developers can deploy what they like and can use the tools that they want it’s gotten harder for human beings to really manage the entire ecosystem even as your demands increase.

    You want it perfect, you want it right now and you want it the way you’d like it to be. PagerDuty is the platform that brings the right problem to the right person at the right time. We use machine learning, sitting on ten years of data, data on humans behavior and data on all these signals there that are happening through the system, and it really helps the developers that sit behind these great experiences to deliver the right experience all the time.

    Machine Learning Should Be Used to Deliver Great Brand Experiences

    Going public is the right time for us right now because there’s an opportunity for us to deliver the power of our platform to users all over the world. We are a small company and we weren’t as well-known as we could be and this is a great opportunity to extend our brand and help developers and employees across teams and IT security and customer support to deliver better experiences for their end customers all the time.

    At PagerDuty we take customer trust and user trust very seriously. We publish our data policy and we will not use data in a way other than what we describe online. We care deeply about the relationship between our users in our platform. Our belief is that machine learning and data should be used in the service of making people better, helping people do their jobs more effectively, and delivering those great brand experiences every time. PagerDuty is really about making sure that our users understand that this could be a good thing, being woken up in the middle of the night if it’s for the right problem. It’s a way that can help you deliver a much better experience for your customers.