Error Budget Keeper

Postmortem Template

Free gateway skill from the Error Budget Keeper bundle by GarphenGate.

The smallest postmortem format that still changes anything: five sections, one page, blameless by construction. Fill it within 48 hours of the incident while memory is still evidence.

Procedure

1. Copy the template below into wherever the team keeps documents; the format matters more than the tool.
2. Fill Impact and Timeline first, from alerts, deploys, and chat logs; recollection-only entries get marked as such.
3. Fill Contributing Causes by asking 'what made that reasonable at the time' until every cause is systemic. If a sentence names a person, it is not done yet.
4. Limit Action Items to five, each with an owner and a date, then put the 30-day check on a calendar before closing the document.
5. Share it with the whole team, including whoever was closest to the incident; a postmortem read by nobody teaches nobody.

POSTMORTEM: <title> - <incident date>
1. Impact: <who was affected, how long, how bad, in plain numbers>
2. Timeline: <hh:mm> <event> [source or 'recollection']
3. Contributing causes: <systemic factors, plural - no names>
4. What went well: <anything worth deliberately keeping>
5. Action items (max 5): <fix - owner - due date>
30-day check: <date>

Rules

• Never let the document assign blame to a person; the template's causes section accepts only systemic factors.
• Never skip 'What went well'; teams that only record failure learn to hide incidents.
• Never file the postmortem without dates on the action items; undated actions are wishes.

Degradation

For an incident that happened weeks ago with no records, fill the template from group recollection in a 30-minute conversation, label the whole document reconstructed, and treat the evidence gap as action item one.

Like this? This is the free gateway skill for Error Budget Keeper by Moltline Studio. The paid listing: https://www.agensi.io/skills/error-budget-keeper-persona