incident-postmortem

Incident Postmortem Skill

This skill produces a complete, blameless incident postmortem document following industry-standard format. Output enforces blameless framing throughout — system gaps over individual failures — and drives toward specific, closeable action items rather than vague process commitments.

Proposes Actions

The action items don't have to stay on the page: hand them to [action-runner](../action-runner/SKILL.md), which previews them (dry-run, risk-rated), runs only what you approve via the connected action MCP, and records what was done back to the brain. Typical: file a follow-up issue per action item (🟡), assigned to its owner with a due date. This skill proposes; action-runner gates and runs — never silently.

Required Inputs

Ask the user for these if not provided:

• Incident title / ID
• Severity (P1 / P2 / P3 or SEV1 / SEV2 / SEV3)
• Date and duration of the incident
• What happened (rough notes are fine — the skill will structure them)
• Services or systems affected
• Customer impact (how many users, what was degraded)
• How it was detected
• How it was resolved
• Initial thoughts on root cause
• Action items already identified (optional)
• Responders (who was on-call or responded — names or roles; used for the timeline, not for blame)
• Customer or external communications sent (optional — any status page updates, emails, or support messages with timestamps)

Reads from / Writes to the Brain

If a [professional-brain](../professional-brain/SKILL.md) (brain/) exists, use it before asking:

• Read first: the affected system's entities/ file and any related prior decisions/ or past incidents (recurring root causes are the most important thing to surface).
• Write after: log the action items and decisions to decisions/, and the root-cause learning to knowledge/ — tag a measured cause [data] and a suspected one [hunch], never the reverse.

Deeper Materials

• references/root-cause-digging.md — five-whys done properly (stop at a changeable system property, branch into cause/detection/response chains), a contributing-factor taxonomy to sweep, and blame-shaped → systemic language rewrites. Use it while writing the Root Cause section and to reframe any blameful input notes.
• templates/review-meeting-agenda.md — a 45-minute, document-first agenda for the postmortem review meeting, with ground rules and an action-item quality gate. Offer it alongside the finished postmortem.

Output Format

---

Incident Postmortem: [Incident Title]

Incident ID: [ID]

Severity: [P1/P2/P3]

Date: [Date]

Duration: [Start time → Resolution time — total duration]

Status: [Resolved / Monitoring / Ongoing]

Author: [Leave blank for user to fill]

Last updated: [Date]

---

Executive Summary

[3–5 sentences. Describe what happened, who was affected, and what was done to resolve it. Written for a non-technical stakeholder. No jargon. No blame.]

---

Impact

| Dimension | Details |

|---|---|

| Users affected | [Number or percentage] |

| Services degraded | [List affected services] |

| Business impact | [Revenue, SLA breach, support tickets, etc. if known] |

| Duration | [Total time from first detection to full resolution] |

---

Timeline

List events in chronological order. Each entry: [HH:MM UTC] — [What happened. Who did what. What changed.]

Rules for timeline entries:

• Use passive or system-focused language — avoid "X made a mistake"
• Include: first symptom, detection, escalation, hypothesis tested, fix applied, confirmation of resolution
• Note time between key events (e.g. "22 minutes between detection and escalation")

Timeline, drawn — also render the incident timeline as a Mermaid Gantt so the gaps (e.g. detection → escalation) are visible at a glance (it renders live in the playground and exports as PNG). Use the incident phases as bars; keep it blameless and system-focused:

gantt
    title Incident timeline (UTC)
    dateFormat HH:mm
    axisFormat %H:%M
    section Phases
        Undetected impact   :22:00, 18m
        Detection           :milestone, 22:18, 0m
        Investigation       :22:18, 22m
        Mitigation          :22:40, 15m
        Resolved            :milestone, 22:55, 0m

---

Root Cause

Primary root cause: [One clear sentence. Technical but plain. "A misconfigured deployment config caused..."]

Contributing factors:

• [Factor 1 — e.g. lack of canary deployment meant change hit 100% of traffic immediately]
• [Factor 2 — e.g. alert threshold was set too high to catch the initial degradation]
• [Factor 3 — add as many as are relevant]

Why did our existing safeguards not prevent this?

[Honest paragraph explaining why monitoring, tests, or processes didn't catch this earlier. This is where blameless analysis matters most — focus on system gaps, not individual failures.]

---

Detection

• How was it first detected? [Customer report / automated alert / internal monitoring / manual observation]
• Time from incident start to detection: [X minutes]
• Should we have detected this faster? [Yes / No — and why]

---

Resolution

What fixed it? [Clear description of the actual fix — one paragraph]

Why did this work? [Brief technical explanation]

Was there a temporary mitigation before full resolution? [Yes/No — describe if yes]

---

Action Items

| # | Action | Owner | Due Date | Priority |

|---|---|---|---|---|

| 1 | [Specific, testable action] | [Team or person] | [Date] | P1/P2/P3 |

Rules for action items:

• Each action must be specific enough to close as "done" or "not done" — no vague items like "improve monitoring"
• Distinguish between: Prevent recurrence (fix the root cause), Improve detection (catch it faster next time), Improve response (resolve it faster next time)
• Assign a real owner — not "team" or "TBD" if avoidable
• Flag P1 actions as items that block the incident from being marked fully closed

---

What Went Well

[3–5 honest observations about the response. Include: fast collaboration, good runbooks used, effective escalation, clear communication. This section builds team confidence and reinforces good habits.]

---

Lessons Learned

[3–5 key insights from this incident that are worth sharing beyond this team. Write these as transferable lessons — e.g. "Our runbook for database failover didn't account for read-replica lag. All runbooks involving database failover should be reviewed."]

---

Communication Log

[Optional — list external communications sent: status page updates, customer emails, support responses. Include timestamps.]

---

Scoring Rubric (0–40)

Score any output of this skill before handing it over; 32+ is ship-quality.

| Dimension | 0 | 5 | 10 |

|---|---|---|---|

| Blamelessness with truth | Names-and-shames, or sanitizes so much the story vanishes | Blameless wording but individual actions blurred | Individuals' actions stated factually inside a systems framing — honest and safe at once |

| Root-cause depth | Stops at the symptom or "human error" | Names a system gap but only one "why" deep | Root cause plus contributing factors explain why the system allowed it, not just what broke |

| Timeline forensic quality | Sparse, unordered, or missing detection-to-resolution beats | Complete but without timestamps or decision points | Timestamped, includes detection lag, decision points, and dead ends actually explored |

| Action-item accountability | Vague improvements, no owners | Owners assigned but items unticketable or dateless | Every item ticketable with owner and due date, mapped to a root cause or contributing factor |

Quality Checks

• [ ] Timeline has no blame-focused language
• [ ] Root cause is specific (not "human error")
• [ ] Root cause answers "why did this happen?" not just "what happened?" — it names a system or process gap, not a symptom
• [ ] Contributing factors explain the systemic gaps
• [ ] Every action item has an owner and due date
• [ ] "What went well" section is genuine, not token
• [ ] No action item contains vague language like "improve monitoring", "increase resilience", or "better testing" — each must name a specific change
• [ ] Executive summary is readable by non-technical leadership

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not assign blame to individuals — postmortems must focus on system and process failures
• [ ] Do not write action items with vague language like "improve monitoring" — each must name a specific, ownable change
• [ ] Do not skip the contributing factors — root cause alone misses the systemic issues that enable incidents
• [ ] Do not omit the detection timeline — how long it took to detect matters as much as how long it took to resolve
• [ ] Do not treat the postmortem as closed until all action items have named owners and due dates

Usage Examples

• "Write a postmortem for the [incident name] outage"
• "Help me write a P1 incident report"
• "Generate an RCA document for [service] going down on [date]"
• "Draft a blameless postmortem from these notes: [paste notes]"