things every staff eng has said in a postmortem

not attributed to anyone specific, just the lines that come out of every blameless retro eventually

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"this is not a blame document"

said at the top of literally every retro, works maybe half the time

"let's do the five whys before we do the vibes"

"everyone in this room made a reasonable call with the information they had"

the actual load-bearing sentence of blameless culture. say it and mean it

"we got lucky, not good, and that's the finding"

"if it's not in the doc it didn't happen"

deploy this the week before your team decides docs are optional again

"the runbook was wrong, that IS the postmortem"

"correlation isn't causation until the graphs agree twice"

ymmv but this has saved me from at least three wrong root causes

"the alert fired, the human just wasn't the one paged"

"action items or it didn't happen"

a postmortem doc with zero action items is a eulogy, not a postmortem

"silence in the retro isn't agreement, ask again"

"we'll ship the fix and forget the lesson, name that pattern now"

the most useful sentence i know and the one i forget to say

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