postmortem-writing

# Postmortem Writing

Comprehensive guide to writing effective, blameless postmortems that drive organizational learning and prevent incident recurrence.

## When to Use This Skill

- Conducting post-incident reviews
- Writing postmortem documents
- Facilitating blameless postmortem meetings
- Identifying root causes and contributing factors
- Creating actionable follow-up items
- Building organizational learning culture

## Core Concepts

### 1. Blameless Culture

| Blame-Focused            | Blameless                         |
| ------------------------ | --------------------------------- |
| "Who caused this?"       | "What conditions allowed this?"   |
| "Someone made a mistake" | "The system allowed this mistake" |
| Punish individuals       | Improve systems                   |
| Hide information         | Share learnings                   |
| Fear of speaking up      | Psychological safety              |

### 2. Postmortem Triggers

- SEV1 or SEV2 incidents
- Customer-facing outages > 15 minutes
- Data loss or security incidents
- Near-misses that could have been severe
- Novel failure modes
- Incidents requiring unusual intervention

## Quick Start

### Postmortem Timeline

```
Day 0: Incident occurs
Day 1-2: Draft postmortem document
Day 3-5: Postmortem meeting
Day 5-7: Finalize document, create tickets
Week 2+: Action item completion
Quarterly: Review patterns across incidents
```

## Templates

### Template 1: Standard Postmortem

```markdown
# Postmortem: [Incident Title]

**Date**: 2024-01-15
**Authors**: @alice, @bob
**Status**: Draft | In Review | Final
**Incident Severity**: SEV2
**Incident Duration**: 47 minutes

## Executive Summary

On January 15, 2024, the payment processing service experienced a 47-minute outage affecting approximately 12,000 customers. The root cause was a database connection pool exhaustion triggered by a configuration change in deployment v2.3.4. The incident was resolved by rolling back to v2.3.3 and increasing connection po