Post-incident reviews: improving team performance and customer confidence
When an incident is finally over, it's hard to be excited about looking back on it. Let's face it: incidents aren't your proudest moment and they can be stressful. A simple mistake might lead to all-hands-on-deck, late-night troubleshooting, and upset customers. Incidents weigh on you.
During an incident, all we want is for the incident to be resolved and for us to go back to normal work. But not so quick! Post-incident reviews are a critical part of the incident response process, and this is where the real trust-building starts with customers.
Properly run post-incident reviews can transform your product and your team, shaping a culture of accountability, learning, and continuous improvement. The result? A more reliable platform and a team your customers can trust.
In this article, we'll explore what a post-incident review (PIR) is, when and why you should conduct one, and how a solid PIR process can build trust with customers.
What is a post-incident review?
A post-incident review (PIR) is the process of understanding what happened, why it happened, and how it was resolved. The end goal of a PIR is to learn, improve, and reduce the chances of the same incident happening again.
Historically, PIRs were referred to as "postmortems". However, over the last decade, many incident teams have moved away from using the term postmortem, which can imply failure and death, and instead prefer terms like post-incident review or retrospective. These alternatives emphasize learning, improvement, and team collaboration.
A post-incident review typically includes a timeline of events, root cause analysis, lessons learned, and clearly defined action items, and it can involve everyone from SRE, engineering, Ops, customer support, and anyone else who was impacted or has insights to contribute.
A PIR is a process that typically results in a document, and it may include a meeting as part of that process. Let's break it down:
- PIR as a process: A structured look back at an incident to understand what happened, why, and how to prevent it from happening again. It involves gathering timelines, facts, and insights from people involved.
- PIR as a document: The formal written report that captures findings from the PIR process. A public PIR usually includes an incident summary, timeline, contributing factors, impact, and root cause. An internal version of a PIR might also include what went well, what didn't go well, and action items for the team.
- PIR as a meeting: A collaborative session with key stakeholders to review the incident and discuss insights. This meeting can be a critical part of the learning process and helps align people on the next steps.
It's worth noting that not every incident needs a post-incident review, and not every PIR needs a meeting or a public write-up. For smaller issues, a quick internal note may be enough. And in many cases, teams run PIRs asynchronously, especially when working across time zones. The key is having a process that matches the scale and impact of the incident.
How your team conducts a PIR and whether you choose to share a PIR document with customers is really up to you. We'll share some best practices on this later in this article, but the most important thing to do is to consider customer impact as well as their expectations.
Why it's easy to skip a post-incident review
Some incidents might not need a full-blown PIR. On the other hand, sometimes skipping a PIR can be a big mistake, especially if the impact is high and customers expect it.
Here are some common reasons teams choose to skip a PIR:
It's tempting to move on
There are always competing priorities and other fires to be fighting. Many teams deprioritize post-incident reviews for the sake of staying on course, hitting deadlines, and maintaining development velocity. They think, "The incident is over, let's just move on".
Mindset shift: Taking the time to conduct a PIR can actually save you time in the long run. By identifying critical areas for improvement, you can reduce the chances of the incident recurring.
They require a lot of resources
Pulling multiple people away from their priorities to conduct a PIR is costly. Think about it: you've got a couple of SREs, an engineering lead, a support lead, and maybe a product manager all spending an hour or more to create a PIR. That could ultimately cost the company thousands of dollars.
Mindset shift: Invest in the PIR now to save money down the road. When done well, a post-incident review will have a lasting impact and help your team and product become stronger.
A fear of blame
If the team culture isn't blameless, people may avoid PIRs to dodge uncomfortable decisions and awkward conversations.
Mindset shift: Avoid finger-pointing. Build a blameless incident management culture to foster a safe space where productive conversations can happen. This ultimately unites the team and creates stronger relationships.
No clear owner or process
Many teams skip the post-incident review process because they haven't defined a process or owner. If it's nobody's job to lead the PIR, then it's likely to fall through the cracks.
Mindset shift: Define which team or role is responsible for conducting a post-incident review and create a standardized process for when and how you do PIRs.
Not seeing the value
If past PIRs have felt like box-ticking exercises with no follow-up, teams won't be motivated to do them again. If this is the case, you might need to refine your process for reviewing incidents, ensuring you run them for the right incidents and always have follow-up action items.
Mindset shift: Consider why your previous PIRs didn't feel useful. Define a clear decision framework for why, when, and how you conduct post-incident reviews moving forward.
How post-incident reviews build customer trust
When something goes wrong, customers don't just want to know you fixed it; they want to know what you learned from it. PIRs force you to look deeper and signal to customers that your team takes incidents seriously, values transparency, and is committed to improving over time.
Shows accountability
PIRs give customers confidence that you're doing the hard work, and you're following through to improve their experience in the future. They show customers you're not hiding behind vague explanations or blaming external factors. Instead, you're owning the issue, analyzing it, and sharing outcomes.
Increases transparency
When key learnings are shared with customers, it tells them you're not afraid to pull back the curtains and give them an inside look into what went wrong. Showing them exactly what happened and what's being done to prevent a repeat incident is a true commitment to transparency, which builds trust.
Shows commitment to improvement
A public PIR process signals that your team doesn't just fix problems reactively, you invest in systems, training, and processes to get better over time. This proactive approach builds confidence that future incidents will be handled even more effectively.
Faster future response
The more you learn from past issues, the better you get at spotting patterns and resolving incidents faster in the future. Whether it's product issues you uncover or internal processes that need to be ironed out, identifying them during a PIR is key. This turns each incident into an opportunity to strengthen both your product and your response strategy.
Improves internal collaboration
Post-incident reviews bring together people from different teams, like engineering, support, and product. This cross-functional collaboration strengthens relationships and improves how teams work together during future incidents.
Best practices for running a post-incident review
Whether you're running your first PIR or refining an existing process, these best practices will help you get the most value from each review:
Keep it blameless
Mistakes happen. The goal isn't to find someone to blame but to understand the systems, processes, or assumptions that led to the incident. A blameless culture encourages honesty and makes PIRs more effective.
Document everything
Keep a clear record of what happened, when, and who was involved. Logs, screenshots, and timelines are your friends here. The more detail you capture during and immediately after the incident, the easier it will be to piece together the story later.
Involve the right people
Get input from everyone who was part of the incident response, as well as anyone who might offer valuable perspective. This could include engineers, support staff, product managers, and even customers in some cases.
Focus on systems, not individuals
When analyzing root causes, look at the conditions that allowed the incident to happen rather than pointing fingers. Did a deployment process fail? Was monitoring inadequate? Did communication break down? These are the questions to ask.
Create actionable follow-ups
A PIR without action items is just a story. Make sure every review ends with clear, assigned tasks that will prevent the issue from happening again or improve response if it does. Track these items to completion.
Share learnings
Don't keep insights siloed. Share your PIR internally so other teams can learn from it. And when appropriate, share a public version with customers to demonstrate transparency and build trust.
A post-incident review template
Here's a simple template you can use as a starting point for your post-incident reviews:
Briefly describe what happened, when it occurred, and how long it lasted.
Who was affected? What services or features were impacted? How many users were impacted?
List key events in chronological order. Include detection, response actions, and resolution.
What ultimately caused the incident? Include any contributing factors or systems involved.
What was done to resolve the issue? Any temporary or emergency fixes?
What changes are being made to prevent recurrence? Who is responsible, and what are the timelines?
How many support tickets were received about the incident?
Link to a status page incident update (if public) and a summary of how the issue was communicated to users.
What went well? What could have gone better? Where did we get lucky?
PIR examples
Let's look at some examples of post-incident reviews shared publicly by some notable companies.
Example 1: Crowdstrike
What they did well: Crowdstrikes famous 2024 outage rocked the world. But they did a great job providing a high level of detail and technical information. Their PIR leaves little room for follow up questions.
View the full Crowd Strike PIR
Example 2: Docker
What they did well: Docker's PIR is very well written. Their introduction quickly explains what happened and why.
Example 3: Linear
What they did well: Linear provided a detailed timeline of events, which is a key component of a good post-incident review.
Creating a post-incident review in Sorry™
Sorry™ makes it easy to share post-incident reviews with customers. When you're ready to share your PIR, simply head over to the incident and write a new update:
You can format your post-incident review using our WYSIWYG. Here's an example of a PIR we shared recently:
Trust comes from clear communication
Customers don't expect perfection, but they do expect honesty and improvement. Post-incident reviews give you a chance to communicate clearly, take ownership, and show you're learning from what went wrong.
Are you looking for an easy way to share post-incident reviews with your customers? Start a free trial of Sorry™ today!
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