Post-Mortem
A blameless structured review of an incident or failure to extract learnings.
Definition
A post-mortem is a formal, blameless review of a specific incident or failure (a bad launch, an outage, a missed goal). The distinguishing feature is blamelessness, the goal is to understand system-level causes, not assign fault. Product Ops often owns the post-mortem template, facilitates the session, and maintains the archive of past post-mortems so learnings compound.
Related concepts
Frequently Asked Questions
A post-mortem is a formal, blameless review of a specific incident or failure (a bad launch, an outage, a missed goal). The distinguishing feature is blamelessness, the goal is to understand system-level causes, not assign fault. Product Ops often owns the post-mortem template, facilitates the session, and maintains the archive of past post-mortems so learnings compound.
Post-Mortem is also commonly called Blameless Post-Mortem, Incident Review. The terms are used interchangeably in most Product Operations contexts.
Post-Mortem is part of the Product Operations vocabulary under the rituals category. Product Ops leaders use this concept when running planning rituals, setting operating standards, and aligning cross-functional stakeholders.