Post Mortems
Note - LastUpdated: 2025.11.23 | 1 min read (213 words)
create | post-mortem | reflect
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TL;DR - A Post Mortem is a reflection / review of an incident to better understand what happened, the scenario that allowed it to happen, and how to prevent it from recurring.
Overview
Post Mortems are a useful practice of reflection for understanding how an incident occurred and coming up with next steps to prevent its recurrence.
Properties of a good Post Mortem
- Overview - A TL;DR of what happened
- Impact - Data on impact to customers and company
- Root Cause - What caused the incident
- Timeline showing what happened, why it happened, and when it happened
- Details and followups for each incident phase
Incident phases (largely pulled from Meta's post mortem process):
- Detection - Knowing smth bad is happening
- Escalation - Escalating to the appropriate parties to solve it
- Mitigation - Stopping the bleeding
- Remediation - Fixing the wound - anything that got hurt from this
- Prevention - Preventing this class of error from happening again
Todos
- Potentially a Post Mortem template?
- Useful frames like chain of events and 5 whys?
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