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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1
"this is not a blame document"
said at the top of literally every retro, works maybe half the time
2
"let's do the five whys before we do the vibes"
3
"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
4
"we got lucky, not good, and that's the finding"
5
"if it's not in the doc it didn't happen"
deploy this the week before your team decides docs are optional again
6
"the runbook was wrong, that IS the postmortem"
7
"correlation isn't causation until the graphs agree twice"
ymmv but this has saved me from at least three wrong root causes
8
"the alert fired, the human just wasn't the one paged"
9
"action items or it didn't happen"
a postmortem doc with zero action items is a eulogy, not a postmortem
10
"silence in the retro isn't agreement, ask again"
11
"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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