BoardSnap is an iOS app that reads whiteboard incident postmortems and turns timelines, root cause analyses, and follow-up commitments into a complete, shareable write-up in under ten seconds.
Incident postmortems work best on a whiteboard. The timeline spreads out horizontally. Contributing factors cluster around root causes. Action items connect back to failure points. The spatial layout of the board IS the analysis.
Then someone has to write it up. The format is usually a structured doc: timeline, root cause, impact, action items. Translating a rich whiteboard into that format — accurately, completely, from memory — takes an hour that nobody wants to spend right after resolving an incident.
Teams skip the write-up, do a half-baked version, or argue about the details two weeks later when the board has been erased. BoardSnap makes the write-up automatic.
Horizontal line across the board. Mark the initial alert, escalation points, key decisions, mitigation start, and resolution. Timestamps are optional but helpful.
Branch off the timeline with the factors that contributed to each key moment. Circle the root cause — the thing that, if fixed, prevents recurrence.
Write the impact metrics in a corner: affected users, downtime duration, revenue impact if known. BoardSnap captures these as context for the summary.
One column for immediate fixes (already done), one for follow-up work (owned by specific people). Name the owner inline if possible.
One snap captures the full postmortem. BoardSnap reads the timeline, factors, root cause, impact, and action items as a coherent structure.
BoardSnap returns a structured postmortem document. Edit it, add context, and publish it — the hard part is already done.
A structured postmortem write-up: incident timeline with key events, root cause summary, impact description, contributing factors, and tri-state action items with owners. The format is ready to paste into your incident management system (PagerDuty, Notion, Confluence, Jira) with minimal editing.
A 47-minute outage with a complex contributing factor tree. BoardSnap read the timeline, identified the root cause (annotated with a circle), and generated eight action items — five already done (marked as in-progress), three follow-up items for the on-call team.
An incident caused by upstream dependency failure. BoardSnap's output made clear that the action items split into two categories: short-term mitigation and long-term architecture changes. The team used it to brief leadership within fifteen minutes of closing the incident.
Yes. The blameless format focuses on system and process factors, not individuals. BoardSnap reads whatever you write — if your annotations focus on failure modes rather than people, that's what goes into the output. See also the blameless-retrospective use case.
Snap multiple overlapping sections if needed. BoardSnap reads the most detail when each section is reasonably clear. Dense timelines are manageable — overlapping scrawls on a tiny section are harder.
Absolutely. Even a ten-minute incident benefits from a quick postmortem snap. The habit builds institutional knowledge, and small incident patterns become visible when they're documented.
If you put it on the board, yes. BoardSnap reads whatever you write. Many teams add a 'what worked' column alongside the contributing factors — BoardSnap captures both.
Snap the board, ship the action items in ten seconds.