PagerDuty CEO sees the rise of 'interrupt work'

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May 9, 2022

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Jill Biden meets with Ukraine’s first lady, Northern Ireland backs Sinn Fein, and running PagerDuty taught CEO Jennifer Tejada about the future of work.
– Future of work. The software company PagerDuty was built to manage “interrupt work.” That’s what CEO Jennifer Tejada calls tasks that aren’t on your calendar at the start of the day. “It’s not the kind of work where you get up in the morning and you know exactly what you’re doing for the day,” she says. “It’s unstructured, unplanned, and generally comes at us in a time-sensitive manner.”
The digital operations platform handles a specific kind of “interrupt work,” automating incident responses to urgent IT problems for customers like Cisco and Zoom. But workers across all functions are seeing unpredictable work take up more and more of their jobs, Tejada says. And even if some jobs don’t tend to involve crises, the unpredictable schedule that comes with working from home and taking care of kids, elderly parents, or even pets, can make feeling interrupted a regular part of the workday.
Jennifer Tejeda, CEO of PagerDuty.Courtesy of PagerDuty That presents an opportunity for PagerDuty. “Work going from being structured, and planned, and predictable to being unstructured and time-critical is part of this huge digital shift,” the CEO says. Managing unpredictable work is just one piece of that transformation.
The CEO and I spoke by phone a few weeks ago, just after the company announced its 2022 fiscal year earnings. (Revenue was up 31.8% year-over-year to $281 million, although PagerDuty’s stock is down 26% in the past year.)
Many CEOs would say they’ve gleaned insights into the future of work by navigating the rapid changes that accompanied the pandemic. But Tejada’s job positioned her particularly well to understand where the modern workplace is headed. (The chief executive has been at the helm of the company since 2016 and took the business public in 2019.) Her target demographic has long been developers, who have been responding to crises at any time from anywhere, well before remote work became the norm. She even tested out the popular idea of a four-day workweek over the past year by offering employees a “wellness day” once a month—soon finding that employees were more productive during shortened weeks. Some staffers used their fifth day of the week to engage in the kind of deep work that the rise of “interrupt work” makes so difficult.
Work over the past two years has been distributed by default, leading to the unpredictability of the current work environment. Now, Tejada argues, it’s time to address some of those challenges and make the workplace “distributed by design.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Subscribe here.

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