Incident postmortems turn production failures into organizational learning. This template provides a structured format for documenting what happened, why it happened, how it was resolved, and what will prevent it from happening again. Following the blameless postmortem philosophy, it focuses on systemic improvements rather than individual blame. Use it after any significant incident to capture lessons learned while the details are fresh.
Blameless Postmortem Culture
The most effective postmortem culture is blameless — it recognizes that incidents are caused by systemic issues, not individual failures. People make mistakes because systems allow those mistakes to cause outages. The goal is to improve systems, processes, and tooling so that the same class of incident cannot recur. This template reinforces this philosophy by focusing sections on systems and processes rather than people.
Template Sections
The postmortem template covers all aspects of incident documentation.
- Incident Summary: One-paragraph description of what happened and its severity
- Timeline: Chronological account of detection, response, and resolution
- Root Cause Analysis: The underlying technical and process failures
- Impact Assessment: Users affected, revenue impact, SLA implications
- Resolution: How the incident was resolved and service restored
- Action Items: Specific, assigned, and time-bound follow-up tasks
- Lessons Learned: What went well, what could be improved
Writing Effective Action Items
The action items section is the most important part of a postmortem. Each action item should be specific (not vague), assigned to an owner, and have a due date. Prioritize actions that prevent recurrence over those that improve detection. Track action items in your issue tracker and review completion in subsequent team meetings.