Postmortems that drive real change

Our template for turning incidents into durable fixes instead of a list of regrets.

Sticky notes arranged on a wall during a workshop

A good postmortem should make it hard for the same incident to happen twice. Here is how we structure ours to keep them blameless and actionable.

Start with a single timeline

We collect chat transcripts, deploy histories, and alert timestamps into one minute-by-minute timeline. That helps us see where detection lagged or decisions slowed down.

Team discussing a project board

Dig into contributing factors

Rather than hunting for a root cause, we list the conditions that allowed impact: missing alerts, risky feature flags, or brittle dependencies. Each one becomes a candidate for follow-up work.

Assign owners and due dates

Action items are limited to the top five most impactful fixes. We track them in the same delivery board as product work, with explicit due dates and status updates until closure.

Structured postmortems keep the learning loop tight and make the next incident easier to handle.