Blameless PM Template
Structured.
Standard sections
Summary: 2-3 sentences. What happened, when, who was affected.
Timeline: events in chronological order with timestamps. Detection, investigation, resolution.
Customer impact: quantified. Number of customers, duration, revenue impact if measurable.
Contributing factors: not single root cause; multiple factors that combined.
Resolution: what fixed it; was it intentional or accidental.
Lessons learned: what we know now that we did not before.
Action items: specific, owned, deadline-bounded.
Blameless language patterns
Focus on systems, not individuals. 'The deploy pipeline allowed an unreviewed change' instead of 'Alice merged without review'.
Counterfactual reasoning. 'What conditions would have prevented this?' rather than 'why did this person fail?'
Avoid 'should have' and 'failed to'. Both imply blame even when targeted at processes.
Sections to drop or modify
Single root cause. Most incidents have multiple contributing factors. Listing one ignores the others.
What went well. Often slips into hagiography. If included, be specific about what process or system worked.
Owner attribution beyond action items. Don't credit or blame individuals for the incident itself.
Sections worth adding
What we got lucky on. The not-so-good cases that did not break. Surfaces hidden risks.
Open questions. Not everything resolves at postmortem time. Documenting open questions ensures follow-up.
Related incidents. Pattern recognition; if this is the third similar incident, the systemic issue is more important.
Review and publishing
Internal review: incident commander, on-call engineers, service owner. Refines content.
Distribution: shared in engineering forum; reviewed in monthly engineering meeting.
Action item tracking: tied to ticketing system; visible until shipped. Without follow-through, postmortems are theatre.