Team Post-Mortem

Purpose

Capture learnings from [initiative] and identify what went wrong so we can get better

The Situation

Put all the details of what happened here. Only the facts. Make sure you answer who what where when why. Customer feedback is good to include if we have it. Include any and all mistakes and what went well. Break up into sections, like “research” “engineering” “customer feedback” “the feature” “marketing efforts” etc.

The results

What happened as a result of the situation? This could include how an initiative performed, what happened as a result of a bug, how a feature fared, etc. Support this section with data

What went wrong

All the details of what went wrong. Opinions are welcome here. Be fair to other people who were involved and let them add to the postmortem or give you context as needed. In the case of bugs, what we could have done better to prevent a problem can be included here as well.

What we can do better next time

Whatever we learned that will affect how we do things next go around, it goes here. This is the synthesis of everything we’ve figured out from doing the postmortem.

Action items

Any action items we have, and who owns each of them, plus dates if possible