Architecting a Technical Post Mortem
summary
Shows a concrete post-mortem workflow used at Etsy: interview actors within two days, run a one-hour meeting scheduled as 5 minutes warmup, 35–40 minutes timeline, 10 minutes Q&A, then remediation; use a scribe, co‑facilitator and shadow facilitator; treat missing CSS that caused cascading 404s and required rolling Apache servers as an example; prefer blame aware post-mortems over performative blamelessness; insist on timelines and logs for evidence, avoid counterfactuals and remember root cause is a fallacy.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 2:00Two Questions
- 4:57Blameless Post Mortems
- 7:52Learning Culture
- 8:33Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset
- 16:37Timeline
- 25:25Root Cause is a Fallacy
- 28:25Defusing Strong Emotions
- 31:15Retributive vs Restorative
- 34:57Post Mortems are not a bubble
- 35:54Systems Fail. Constantly.
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