Summary
Postmortems or, as some call them, RCAs, are vital to the outage process. They aren’t only about the technical details of the outage; in fact, the technical details are actually the easiest and often the area of least concern – probably due to the highly technical nature of a rockstar SRE. Ensuring we call out the proper information without finger-pointing is key in delivering a professional postmortem.
As you walk through doing postmortems, pay close attention to the future work callouts, and vet those ideas well, not only with your manager but also trusted allies inside the company. Two of the unspoken key points of discussion are to take in concerns and build a coalition, before walking into postmortem discussions.
Remember that a postmortem’s future work should be tracked and revisited periodically. It’s okay for items to be dropped or postponed far into the future, but a discussion with the team, who hold the business risk, should be part...
