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Conducting Post-Mortems for Business: Incident Playbook
79 students
What you'll learn
- Run structured, blameless post-mortems that turn incidents into concrete learning instead of finger-pointing or quiet failures.
- Apply Root Cause Analysis, Five Whys, and Fishbone diagrams to uncover systemic causes instead of stopping at surface symptoms.
- Plan and schedule post-mortems with clear timelines, pre-reads, and agendas that keep discussions focused, efficient, and productive.
- Facilitate psychologically safe conversations that encourage honest input, reveal real constraints, and avoid blame-heavy dynamics.
- Translate post-mortem insights into actionable fixes, named owners, and follow-up workflows that actually get implemented.
- Build a repeatable post-mortem practice that boosts reliability, reduces repeat incidents, and supports a continuous learning culture.
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Course content
4 sections • 12 lectures • 1h 28m total length
Requirements
- No prior experience is required
Description
When something fails in your business—a launch slips, a system goes down, a customer experience breaks—what happens next?
For many teams, the answer is uncomfortable: people scramble to fix the immediate issue, quietly move on, and hope it never happens again. No proper review, no clear root cause, and no real learning. Meanwhile, the stakes are high:
The average cost of downtime is estimated around $5,600 per minute for many organizations.
Studies suggest 66–80% of outages are linked to human error—things like process gaps, unclear handoffs, or missing safeguards.
In research summarized by Harvard Business Review, 85% of executives say their organizations are bad at diagnosing problems, and 87% believe that weakness carries significant costs.
Site Reliability Engineering guidance from companies like Google shows that well-written, acted-on post-mortems are one of the most effective tools for preventing repeat incidents and driving positive change.
In other words: incidents, failed projects, and outages are expensive—but they’re also some of the richest learning opportunities your organization ever gets… if you know how to run post-mortems properly.
That’s exactly what this course is designed to help you do.
You’ll learn how to turn failures, near-misses, and big launches into structured, blameless learning sessions that actually change how your team works.
We’ll walk through:
What post-mortems are (and aren’t). Clarify the difference between post-mortems, retrospectives, and debriefs—and where each one fits in your workflows.
Why post-mortems matter to the bottom line. See how post-mortems reduce repeat incidents, strengthen reliability, and improve customer experience across tech, operations, and business teams.
Blame vs. blameless post-mortems. Understand how psychological safety, trust, and clear ground rules turn defensive meetings into honest, high-value conversations.
Root Cause Analysis fundamentals. Learn how to move beyond “what broke” to “why it made sense at the time,” using Root Cause Analysis, the Five Whys, and Fishbone (Ishikawa) diagrams.
Practical tools for analysis. Use RCA, Five Whys, Fishbone diagrams, Pareto thinking, and other visual tools to untangle complex incidents with multiple contributing factors.
Preparing effective post-mortems
Decide when to run a post-mortem, how soon after an incident to schedule it, what data to gather, and how to design clear agendas and pre-reads.Facilitating blameless conversations. Lead post-mortems that stay focused on facts and systems—not people—using facilitation techniques, ground rules, and neutral questioning.
Converting insights into action. Turn lessons learned into specific, owned action items, track them in your existing tools, and make sure fixes actually get implemented.
Building a continuous learning culture. Connect post-mortems to frameworks like PDCA and continuous improvement, and use them to strengthen reliability and resilience over time.
Real-world case study: Etsy’s blameless approach. See how Etsy runs open, inclusive, blameless post-mortems at scale, how they train facilitators, and how internal tools help turn every incident into a learning asset.
By the end of this course, you’ll have a repeatable playbook for post-mortems that:
Reduces repeat incidents and outages
Improves cross-functional collaboration and transparency
Strengthens psychological safety and trust
Helps your organization learn faster than the problems it faces
Whether you work in engineering, operations, product, customer experience, marketing, or any function that runs complex projects or systems, this course will help you turn “things went wrong” into “we’re now stronger than before.”
If you’re ready to move beyond blame, stop wasting hard-won lessons, and build a culture that learns from every incident—this course is for you.
Who this course is for:
- Engineering managers, tech leads, SRE and DevOps leaders who own incident response and service reliability.
- Product managers and project managers who shepherd complex launches or cross-functional initiatives.
- Operations, IT, and infrastructure leaders responsible for uptime, processes, and critical business systems.
- Customer support, CX, and service leaders who want to learn from escalations and prevent repeat customer pain.
- Team leads in marketing, HR, and business operations running campaigns, programs, or initiatives where stakes are high.
- Incident managers, risk, and business continuity professionals looking for stronger post-incident review practices.
- Aspiring leaders and individual contributors who want to bring a blameless, learning-oriented post-mortem practice to their teams.