What practices make a company's postmortem process actually effective rather than symbolic?

Tony Fadell · May 11, 2022

A good postmortem covers what you got right as well as wrong and separates macro environmental causes from internal process failures

You can't blame a business for a macro event like the pandemic, but failing to pivot within that environment is your own process problem; splitting the two lets you spot and avoid the failure modes next time

42:08 Good postmortems separate macro environmental causes from internal process failures and credit successes too

Max Levchin · Feb 5, 2025

A postmortem culture requires strict segregation of each incident's data into its own channel and document from the outset

Good postmortem cultures generate huge volumes of data, much of it irrelevant, and it's very hard to peel apart details of event one from event two after the fact

21:04 Strict per incident data segregation into its own channel and document is required

Max Levchin · Feb 5, 2025

Postmortems only actually happen if there is a named directly responsible individual whose manager knows it's now part of their job, a one-to-two week deadline, and a weekly review

Without assigned responsibility and a review forum the practice degrades into a nice idea nobody executes

23:13 Named owner tight deadline and weekly review are required for postmortems to happen

Max Levchin · Feb 5, 2025

Good postmortems are matter-of-fact and focus on events and decisions, never on the individual

The event is in the past and unchangeable; the useful output is a systemic fix (e.g. adding a guard on the switch) rather than blame

24:15 Good postmortems focus matter of factly on events and decisions never the individual

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

PMs are usually enamored with their solution and fail to write down the hypothesis behind it, which is why failed products get blamed on design, marketing or sales when the real cause was a wrong hypothesis

Without a written-down hypothesis about the customer, problem and solution, you can't reflect on why the product failed or learn from it

31:30 Unwritten hypotheses explain why failed products get misattributed to execution

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

Postmortems should be blameless, cross-functional (including non-engineering teams affected), fact-driven, and end in clear timely action items

The teams that bear the consequences of a screw-up are often customer service or account managers, not engineering, so bringing them together with the data builds trust and surfaces better fixes

33:09 Blameless cross functional fact driven postmortems with clear action items