Post-Mortem Meeting Template

A blameless post-mortem template to help teams learn from incidents, project failures, or missed launches. Focused on systemic fixes, not finger-pointing.

60 min

3–15 participants

Free download

Incident / Project Details

Incident / project name:
Date of incident:
Date of post-mortem:
Facilitator:
Attendees:
Severity: Critical / High / Medium / Low

Summary

What happened? (2-3 sentences, no jargon)
What was the impact? (users affected, revenue, time lost)
How long did it last?
How was it resolved?

Timeline of Events

[Time] — Event or action
[Time] — Event or action
[Time] — First detection
[Time] — Response initiated
[Time] — Resolution

What Went Well

Detection: how quickly was the issue found?
Response: what worked in how the team responded?
Communication: what was handled well?
Tools or processes that helped:

What Went Wrong

Root cause (use 5 Whys if needed):
Contributing factors:
Detection gaps: why wasn't this caught earlier?
Process failures:
Communication gaps:

5 Whys Analysis

Why did the problem occur? →
Why did that happen? →
Why did that happen? →
Why did that happen? →
Why did that happen? → (root cause)

Action Items

[ ] Fix — Owner — Due — Priority
[ ] Process change — Owner — Due — Priority
[ ] Monitoring / alerting improvement — Owner — Due
[ ] Documentation update — Owner — Due

What We Will Do Differently

Short-term changes (within 2 weeks):
Medium-term changes (within 30 days):
Long-term systemic improvements:

Tips

Run the post-mortem as soon as possible after the incident — within 48-72 hours while it is fresh.
Use blameless language throughout. The goal is to fix systems, not assign fault.
Share the completed post-mortem document with the whole organisation, not just those in the room.
Follow up on every action item at the next team meeting — post-mortems only create value if actions get done.

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