Postmortem Template (Learn, Don't Blame)

Document incidents and outages to prevent repeat failures.

Prompt

Create a postmortem for {INCIDENT}.

Input:
- What happened: {SUMMARY}
- When: {DATE_TIME}
- Duration: {DURATION}
- Impact: {IMPACT}

Rules:
- Use blameless language (focus on systems, not people)
- Include timeline with timestamps
- Identify root cause and contributing factors
- Create actionable prevention steps with owners

Output format:
SUMMARY (severity, impact, duration)
TIMELINE (key events with timestamps)
ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
- Primary cause
- Contributing factors
IMPACT
- Users affected
- Revenue/business impact
- Internal impact
WHAT WENT WELL (yes, really)
ACTION ITEMS (owner, deadline, priority)
- Prevention
- Detection
- Response

Incident: {INCIDENT}
Summary: {SUMMARY}
Date: {DATE_TIME}
Impact: {IMPACT}

Variations

• Add 5 Whys analysis for root cause.

• Include communication timeline (who was notified when).

• Add lessons learned section with key takeaways.

• Make it short-form (one-pager for minor incidents).

Works well with

• GPT

• Claude

• Gemini

Appears in collections

Code Review System (Helpful Feedback, Not Nitpicks)

Review code that improves quality, teaches developers, and ships faster.