Postmortems That Drive Real Improvement (+ Template)
The incident is over. The system’s green. Everyone’s relieved. You can go back to sleep now.
But without a proper postmortem, you’re likely to repeat the same fire drill next month—with the same confusion, stress, and delays.
Postmortems aren’t just documentation exercises. Done well, they’re powerful tools for continuous improvement, team alignment, and culture-building.
In this article, we’ll walk through how to run postmortems that actually make your systems and teams stronger—not just your incident timeline longer.
Why Postmortems Matter
Incidents are inevitable. What separates high-performing teams is not how rarely they fail—but how well they learn from failure.
A strong postmortem:
- Helps your team understand what happened and why
- Identifies system or process weaknesses—not people
- Surfaces actions to prevent repeat issues
- Reinforces good behaviors under pressure
Too often, though, postmortems are rushed, overly technical, or just ignored. The result? No follow-through, no learning, no improvement.
The Firefighter Trap
We recently interviewed a senior tech lead who told us about an antipattern called ‘The Firefighter Trap:’
This is the story of how I fired the Ops Engineer who was consistently the highest rated on the team. Everyone had a story of how the system had gone down in the middle of the night, or how a key user’s data had gotten corrupted with bad database entries, and our favorite Ops Engineer was the one who swooped in and got things working right away.
Unsurprisingly, this engineer became known as the one who put out the most fires, and everyone gave him glowing reviews. The problem was that once we took a look at these incidents, striking similarities showed up: for one set of incidents a race condition could cause a table mismatch. In another, a key service leaked memory badly and needed to be manually restarted.
When I looked at the firefighter’s workload it seemed that all his time went to putting out these fires, and he wasn’t identifying the underlying issues that caused these outages. After a short spike to fix these issues, it took two weeks to resolve this tech debt. With a better post-mortem process, we wouldn’t have needed the full-time work of a senior engineer to fix issues manually.
It’s great to take a victory lap after an incident is resolved. But you must work to ensure that this problem is handled automatically in the future. Post-mortems, then are a critical step in incident response: Without them you’re likely to find yourself stuck in a loop of responding to incidents without solving their causes.
What a Great Postmortem Looks Like
Here’s the anatomy of a postmortem that actually drives improvement, based on the framework shared in the webinar:
1. Create a Safe, Blameless Space
Psychological safety is the foundation. No one should feel like they’re on trial. Focus on systems, not individuals. Use phrases like:
- “What signals did we miss?”
- “What could we improve in the process?”
- “Where was communication unclear?”
If people fear blame, they’ll delay declaring incidents or avoid contributing to future postmortems. Safety enables transparency.
2. Write a Clear, Honest Timeline
Document the incident as it unfolded:
- When did the issue start?
- When was it detected?
- Who responded and what actions were taken?
- When was it resolved?
Include timestamps, links to check results or traces, and any relevant logs. This isn’t just about storytelling—it’s about understanding time to detect, time to resolve, and where delays happened.
3. Analyze What Went Wrong—and Why
Was there a monitoring gap? A failed alert? A communication bottleneck? A missing runbook?
Drill deeper than “the service went down.” For example:
- The alert didn’t fire because it was misconfigured
- The responder didn’t act immediately because ownership was unclear
- The customer wasn’t notified because the status page wasn’t linked to the alert channel
Go beyond symptoms and look at root causes—technical and procedural.
💡 What about ‘a third party service went down’? Surely that’s the end of the analysis, right? While you can’t debug another service’s internals, try asking these questions:
- Next time, can we fail gracefully?
- Is it possible to use another service as a fallback?
- Can we monitor this third-party service proactively, e.g., with an API monitor?
4. Capture What Went Well
It’s easy to focus on failures, but recognizing what worked reinforces good behavior and boosts team morale.
Did the alert fire correctly? Did someone step up as incident commander? Was customer comms fast and clear?
Call it out. Celebrate wins—even in chaos.
5. Define Next Steps With Owners
Turn findings into action:
- Add a missing alert or adjust thresholds
- Update a runbook
- Automate a manual communication step
- Clarify on-call roles or escalation paths
Each action item should have an owner and a due date. Otherwise, nothing changes.
💡 We did a whole webinar on incidents and post-mortems, which you can watch on-demand here.
Steal Our Postmortem Template
If you want a ready-to-use postmortem template you can steal and/or adapt, use ours:
Postmortems Are Not Just for SEV1s
Every SEV1 should have a postmortem. But consider doing them for SEV2s too—especially if:
- A monitoring or escalation gap was exposed
- Customers were confused due to poor comms
- On-call responders were unclear about their role
Small incidents are often the warning signs for bigger ones. Don’t miss the learning moment.
Final Thoughts
Postmortems aren’t just a checkbox at the end of an incident—they’re a lever for building resilience, clarity, and trust.
Done right, they strengthen your systems. More importantly, they strengthen your team’s confidence in handling future incidents.