Postmortem Generator

postmortem-generator

Turns the debris of an incident — Slack scrollback, pager entries, half-remembered timestamps — into a postmortem the next on-caller learns from. Blameless is structural here, not a tone: the doc names systems and gaps, never people and mistakes. The operate-phase counterpart to runbook-generator, which consumes this skill's runbook-delta output.

How to respond

1. Ingest the raw material. Slack threads, pager/alert timelines, deploy logs, prose recollections — all valid. Ask at most 2 questions, and spend them on impact quantification ("how many users / requests / minutes?") — it's the data people forget fastest and the section read first. Everything else unknown gets a visible [missing] tag, never a vague sentence papering over it.

2. Strip blame structurally while drafting. People appear only as roles performing response actions ("on-call engineer rolled back at 14:32"). Errors are attributed to the system that allowed them. ✅ "A malformed config value passed review and deploy; no validation step checks this field" — ❌ "Dave pushed a bad config". If the source material is finger-pointy, translate it; the postmortem is the cleaned record.

3. Build the timeline in UTC with one row per event (timestamp, what happened, source). Then compute and state the two gaps that matter:

   • Detection gap — impact start → first human aware. If users noticed before monitoring did, say so in those words.
   • Mitigation gap — detection → impact ended. The timeline ends at "impact over", not "everyone went to bed"; cleanup goes under follow-ups.

4. Write contributing factors, not a root cause. Minimum 2, typically 3–5, using "why was that possible?" chains. "Human error" is banned as a factor — it is always the start of a question, never the answer: what made the error easy to make, hard to catch, and fast to propagate? Each factor states the condition, not the act.

5. Force the three honesty lists: what went well (so it gets repeated), what went poorly (response-side, not cause-side), and where we got lucky — the near-misses that would have made this worse. The lucky list is mandatory; an incident with no luck involved hasn't been examined closely.

6. Cap action items at 8, each with: owner (role, not name), class (prevent recurrence / detect faster / mitigate faster), and a verifiable done-condition. ✅ "Config deploys reject values failing schema validation — verified by a test deploy of a malformed value" — ❌ "Improve config safety". If the analysis surfaces 15 candidates, pick the 8 with the best leverage and list the rest as "considered, not taken" with one line each on why.

7. End with runbook deltas — the specific sections of the service runbook this incident proves wrong or missing, phrased as edits ready for runbook-generator or a human to apply.

8. Emit with templates/postmortem.md in one message, summary first: severity, duration, quantified impact, and the one-sentence cause a director can repeat.

Useful references in this skill

• templates/postmortem.md — the full doc skeleton with the gap calculations and action-item table

Quality bar

• Impact is numbers or [missing]. Duration, users/requests affected, SLO burn, revenue if known. "Significant impact" is not a measurement.
• No person is named in a causal sentence. Roles appear in response actions only. One named-blame sentence fails the doc.
• Detection and mitigation gaps are computed and stated. They are the two numbers the next incident will be judged against.
• At least 2 contributing factors, zero of them "human error". A single root cause means the chain of "why was that possible?" stopped one question early.
• Every action item is verifiable and owned. A reader can check it's done without asking anyone's opinion; an item without a done-condition is a wish.
• "Where we got lucky" is non-empty. Naming the near-miss is how it gets fixed before it's the next incident's headline.

When to use this skill

• ✅ After an incident/outage, turning the response scrollback into the postmortem doc
• ✅ "Write the RCA for yesterday's outage"
• ✅ Preparing the incident-review meeting doc
• ✅ Retroactively documenting an old incident before the details evaporate

When NOT to use this skill

• ❌ During the incident — mitigate first; the postmortem starts when impact ends
• ❌ A performance-management record — the doc is structurally blameless; misusing it kills honest reporting
• ❌ Project retrospectives with no production incident — different ritual, different doc
• ❌ Writing the runbook itself — emit the deltas and hand to runbook-generator

Anti-patterns to avoid

• ❌ Single root cause. "The config was wrong" explains nothing about review, validation, deploy gates, or blast radius — the four places to actually fix.
• ❌ "Human error" / "should have been more careful". Careful is not a control. Name the missing guardrail instead.
• ❌ The 20-item action list. It signals diligence and delivers nothing; nobody finishes it and the P1s drown.
• ❌ Timeline theater. Forty rows of who-said-what-in-Slack instead of the ten events that changed system state.
• ❌ Quiet heroics as a fix. "An engineer noticed by luck at 2am" is a detection gap wearing a cape — the action item is monitoring, not gratitude.
• ❌ Skipping the postmortem because impact was "minor". Near-misses are the cheapest lessons; severity gates the meeting, not the doc.