Incident Post-Mortem

Guide a team through writing a structured, blameless post-mortem after a production incident. The output is a document that builds shared understanding, identifies root causes without blame, and produces concrete action items to prevent recurrence.

Blameless Principle

Systems fail, not people. The goal is to understand HOW the incident happened — not WHO caused it. Avoid language like "X forgot to", "Y should have known". Use "the system did not", "the process lacked", "the alert did not fire".

When to Use

• Production outage or service degradation has been resolved
• A significant near-miss occurred (would have been an incident if caught later)
• User-facing errors, data loss, or SLA breach happened
• Team wants to capture learnings before context fades

Not for: Minor bugs caught in staging, planned maintenance windows, or incidents with no learning value.

Input Requirements