Post-mortem
Definition
A structured retrospective conducted after a project, incident, or failure — focused on understanding the sequence of events, root causes, and corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
The term post-mortem (from Latin: 'after death') originally described a medical autopsy, and the business usage carries that same forensic connotation: examine what happened, understand why, and draw conclusions before moving on.
Post-mortem vs. sprint retro: A sprint retro is a routine ceremony that reflects on process. A post-mortem is typically triggered by a specific event — a production outage, a failed launch, a significant bug, or a project that came in over budget and behind schedule. The scope is narrower and the stakes are higher.
Standard post-mortem structure:
- Summary: one-paragraph description of what happened and its impact.
- Timeline: chronological sequence of key events and decisions.
- Root cause: the underlying cause (not just the proximate trigger).
- Contributing factors: other conditions that made the failure possible.
- Action items: specific changes, with owners and due dates.
- Lessons learned: what the team would do differently.
Written vs. whiteboard: Many teams draft the timeline and root cause analysis on a whiteboard before writing the formal document. The whiteboard session is generative; the doc is the artifact. Snap the whiteboard with BoardSnap to get a structured draft of the timeline and action items before anyone opens a doc.
Examples
- A payments team writes a post-mortem after a 47-minute outage that affected 12,000 transactions — the root cause: a config change deployed without a feature flag.
- A product team writes a post-mortem after a major feature launch underperformed, discovering the target audience was misidentified in the PRD.
- An ops team uses the post-mortem process after a data breach to produce documentation for both internal learning and customer communication.
- A startup founder runs a lightweight post-mortem after a failed fundraising round to capture lessons before starting the next process.
Snap a post-mortem. Ship its actions.
BoardSnap turns any whiteboard — including this one — into a summary and action plan.