claudegoodies
Skill

postmortem-writing

From wshobson

Write effective blameless postmortems with root cause analysis, timelines, and action items. Use when conducting incident reviews, writing postmortem documents, or improving incident response processes.

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wshobson/agents
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Actively maintained
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The instructions Claude Code reads when this skill runs.

# Postmortem Writing

Comprehensive guide to writing effective, blameless postmortems that drive organizational learning and prevent incident recurrence.

## When to Use This Skill

- Conducting post-incident reviews
- Writing postmortem documents
- Facilitating blameless postmortem meetings
- Identifying root causes and contributing factors
- Creating actionable follow-up items
- Building organizational learning culture

## Core Concepts

### 1. Blameless Culture

| Blame-Focused            | Blameless                         |
| ------------------------ | --------------------------------- |
| "Who caused this?"       | "What conditions allowed this?"   |
| "Someone made a mistake" | "The system allowed this mistake" |
| Punish individuals       | Improve systems                   |
| Hide information         | Share learnings                   |
| Fear of speaking up      | Psychological safety              |

### 2. Postmortem Triggers

- SEV1 or SEV2 incidents
- Customer-facing outages > 15 minutes
- Data loss or security incidents
- Near-misses that could have been severe
- Novel failure modes
- Incidents requiring unusual intervention

## Quick Start

### Postmortem Timeline

```
Day 0: Incident occurs
Day 1-2: Draft postmortem document
Day 3-5: Postmortem meeting
Day 5-7: Finalize document, create tickets
Week 2+: Action item completion
Quarterly: Review patterns across 
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