Postmortems, Learning & Blameless Culture
summary
Describes a concrete postmortem workflow used at PagerDuty: assign one owner, schedule a 30–60 minute meeting, publish the draft 24 hours ahead, keep timelines factual and start before detection, and require 3 business days for a sev one and 5 business days for a sev two to complete the writeup. Action items must be actionable, specific, and bounded and high‑priority fixes target 15 days for sev one / 30 days for sev two. Emphasizes blamelessness while acknowledging biases and shares postmortems company‑wide for learning and accountability.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Postmortems and blameless culture
- 5:25Postmortems drive improvement
- 13:25Blamelessness and cognitive biases
- 19:28Building blameless culture
- 23:43Tips for action items
- 30:44Incident impact and factors
- 37:43Writing effective postmortems
- 40:10Facilitating postmortem meetings
- 42:17Key takeaways
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