Jennifer Tejada (LinkedIn | Twitter) is all about service. Caring for others was a virtue instilled in her by her father, who ran a hospital. Even though he was the boss, he kept a humble attitude that shaped Jennifer’s philosophy today. “It was funny because, for a long time, I didn’t actually know he was the boss because he didn’t act like one. We’d walk into the hospital and we’d say hi to everybody we bumped into, the janitor or a nurse or the chief of the medical staff or someone working in the cafeteria, and it was always the same. It was the same sort of warm greeting. He knew everybody by name. He knew something about their family or their kids.”
Jennifer aspires to serve others, especially now that she is at the top: She’s the CEO of PagerDuty, the leading digital operations management platform for businesses. Their SaaS-based solution empowers over 10,000 small, mid-size and enterprise global customers with the insight to intelligently respond to critical disruptions for exceptional customer experience. “I think service starts with looking outward instead of looking inward. And often, when you’re building cultural values or you’re building the framework for how you want your company to feel and smell and sound, you’re thinking really hard about yourselves. You’re thinking really hard about the company itself, the people within the company, your own sense of values, and a picture that you’ve really tried to focus outward. One of our first cultural values is champion the customer.”
And part of helping the customer means being on top of problems. That idea was the incubator for PagerDuty. “We were really built, over ten years ago, by three co-founders who came from Waterloo University. They had gone to school together, and they had worked at Amazon together. They had experienced this issue of being alerted, being paged – literally – on a one-way pager whenever anything broke. And when I say anything, I mean anything, not just things they were responsible for, not just products or services their teams were working on, but anything across the infrastructure or application stack that supported their teams, products, and services. And back then, it was the procurement environment for Amazon.com. They found that it really hindered their lifestyles. It was really hard to be successful in their day jobs when they’re being woken up all night and all weekend for things that were breaking unexpectedly. I think it’s not just the disruption and the loss of time. It’s the stress. It’s the physical and emotional and mental stress, when you’re under time pressure, when something’s not working and you know you’re the first line of defense, and you have no idea what you’re doing. You have no idea what the problem is. You don’t have any context or background on the situation itself. That was the early seed that became PagerDuty. This challenge that as companies build products and service that are primarily digital. As the technology that sits behind those services is increasingly complex, the data and the signals that are coming at developers and IT people, operations people, they’re getting more complex. And they’re really hard for human beings to pick apart and understand or to find signal from the noise.”
And how do they do that? “PagerDuty uses machine learning and direct connection to anything that’s software enabled, and turns those signals into insight and information and actionable direction, and we actually orchestrate the work associated with identifying a problem quickly, getting the right people with the right skillsets on the right problems at the right time, and running the response that then enables that company or that customer to serve their end consumer seamlessly. Hopefully, as our users and our customers get more mature in the way they leverage our platform, they get better at preventing major incidents that impact businesses and customers from happening.”
While this seems like an obvious fit for Jennifer, she admits that she wasn’t interested in the job, at first. “Someone reached out to me and said, ‘There is a company you really should look at. It’s really interesting. You’d be perfect for it.’ And I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ They’re like, ‘Well it’s kind of infrastructure software. It’s SaaS.” I said, ‘No, thank you.’”
It wasn’t what she was looking for. But after several pleas, she finally agreed to meet with John O’Farrell, one of the founders of PagerDuty. His honesty and willingness to ask for help changed her mind: “The co-founder – one of three co-founders who had been leading the business – had recognized that he did not have the skills and the experience to take the business through its next several chapters of growth, and was looking for someone to come in and not just help him do that, but lead him in doing that. So essentially he was looking for a new boss. And very rarely do you find a founder who has led a business successfully be willing to step aside and offer their job, and to another leader, and in fact work for another leader, much less step aside and make room for someone to have the autonomy to really build and grow a company in an effective and I think enjoyable way. So Alex was very special in that regard.” She took the job, and the rest is history.
There are big things in store for PagerDuty. They recently went public, but Jennifer knows there’s still nothing but opportunity on the horizon: “We’re not even close to being done. I feel like we’ve just gotten out of the gates. I use the sailing analogy with my team, and it’s a little bit like pushing the boat off the dock and getting over the start line. But we aren’t even out the heads. We’re not even out in the big ocean. There’s still a lot of sea in front of us, and I truly feel that way.”
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