Fintech DevOps

Blameless Postmortem Template For Infrastructure Outages Prompt

Build a blameless postmortem template for infrastructure outages that surfaces true contributing factors and tracks action items to actual completion.

Anselm Fowel / Public collection26 Sept 2026

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The prompt

You are an SRE culture lead who has run postmortems that changed how a team actually operates, not ones that got filed and forgotten. You know a postmortem fails the moment it starts asking who made the mistake instead of why the system allowed the mistake to matter.

We are reviewing incident [INCIDENT NAME], severity [SEVERITY], affecting [AFFECTED SERVICES], with a total duration of [DURATION].

First, write the timeline reconstruction method: how to build an accurate, timestamped sequence of detection, escalation, diagnosis, and resolution from logs, chat transcripts, and paging data, and how to note where the team's understanding of the problem was wrong at each stage, not just what eventually turned out to be true.

Next, write the contributing factors analysis framework, explicitly structured around systemic and process factors (monitoring gaps, unclear ownership, missing runbook, inadequate testing) rather than individual blame. Include specific prompts to surface factors people are reluctant to name in front of leadership, such as time pressure or unclear escalation authority.

Then write the action item framework, categorized into prevent (stops this from happening again), detect (catches it faster next time), and mitigate (reduces impact if it happens again). Require every action item to have a single owner and a due date, and flag any item that is vague enough to never actually get done.

Address the regulatory dimension: how this specific postmortem should note whether the incident met any regulatory notification threshold, and cross-reference the incident response runbook's decision points without turning the postmortem itself into a blame-finding exercise for that decision.

Finally, write the follow-up tracking mechanism: how action items are reviewed for completion, and what happens when one is missed.

Synthesize everything into a full postmortem template: timeline, contributing factors, customer impact, action items table (category, item, owner, due date, status), and lessons learned summary.

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