Every team drops the ball sometimes. Projects slip, apps crash, or a launch flops. The blame game starts fast, but then what? For most people in tech or business, a post-mortem steps in. It’s the meeting you hold after things go wrong (or right), to figure out how it happened, and what you can do next time.
A post-mortem is just a review after an event—good or bad. Sounds simple, but when done well, it might be the most powerful way for teams to get better at what they do.
Why Do Post-Mortems Matter?
Let’s be honest, most of us want to move on after a bumpy project. But when post-mortems are skipped, teams miss out. For one, these meetings help everyone talk honestly—sometimes for the first time in a while.
Post-mortems highlight both the big wins and the awkward failures. They let teams spot useful shortcuts, wasted effort, and risks that didn’t pay off. Over time, these lessons help a team move faster without making the same mistakes.
Good post-mortems don’t just patch up process. They make teams more open, faster at reacting, and smarter for whatever comes next.
Getting Ready for a Useful Post-Mortem
You can’t wing it with post-mortems, though. A little groundwork avoids time-wasting griping. Someone (often a project manager or engineer) should collect data before the meeting. This can be chat transcripts, incident logs, timelines—whatever shows what really happened.
Next, think about who should be there. Pull in the folks most involved, but also a few who see the bigger picture. Don’t overload the meeting, though; too many cooks, and you get nowhere.
A good setup is half the battle. When the facts are fresh, and people know why they’re at the table, you’ll get real feedback instead of polite nods.
How to Structure the Conversation
Kicking off is always awkward. It helps to keep things simple and predictable. One tactic: start with what went well. It’s not just about bad news—everyone needs a win now and then.
Then, talk about things you think could’ve worked better. The trick is focusing on actions and conditions, not who made a mistake. You want facts and fixes, not gossip.
Wrap things up by asking, “What can we use from all this next time?” Write those answers down. The meeting should end with at least one concrete thing the team will try to do differently.
The Questions That Keep Teams Honest
You’ll hear the same three questions in the best post-mortems—and they never get old.
What went well? This is usually easier for shy folks to share. Give the team credit for what worked. It builds trust.
What could have been improved? Surface the uneasy moments, confusing handoffs, or missed signals. Don’t dwell, but don’t skip the tough stuff either.
How can we apply what we learned? If you only talk about problems, you end up venting. The key is to find “next steps” that actually get done later on.
Keeping It Positive—and Real
People are wary about post-mortems for one reason: nobody likes to feel blamed. If you want an open conversation, leaders and note-takers need to make that clear.
When someone speaks up, others need to listen—especially if it’s awkward. Shut down finger-pointing fast. If a process failed, say it. If someone dropped the ball because they were underwater, say that too, without a pile-on.
Teams that use “we” and “this system” instead of “Dave messed up” have more valuable sessions. The goal is learning as a group, not “gotcha” moments.
Writing It Down, Sharing What Matters
A solid post-mortem report helps keep the action points from disappearing by next week. This isn’t about fancy PowerPoints. It’s about notes that are detailed enough to help next time, and easy for new team members to grasp.
Share the findings with whoever needs to know. Sometimes another team is dealing with a similar process, or a new hire might face the same obstacles you did.
Don’t forget to actually follow up. No post-mortem fixes itself. Schedule a time to check what changed—did any of the lessons stick? Sometimes, that’s all it takes to build real momentum across teams.
What Trips Teams Up
Some post-mortems get tense, especially when the topic is sensitive. If people worry about justifying their job, the meeting tanks. One solution is to have a neutral facilitator ask the hard questions, so no one feels cornered.
Getting real feedback from quiet folks can be tough. Encourage everyone to submit notes before the meeting, or to speak in small groups first.
If you keep seeing the same mistakes in every review, that’s a sign. Maybe your action list is too vague. Or maybe nobody is checking on follow-through.
One trick is to name a single owner for each fix. That way, the next review starts with “How did that go?”—not silence.
Stories from the Trenches
Teams in big tech companies approach post-mortems in different ways, but many share simple notes as part of their process. For example, one San Francisco software team had a huge outage last year. Their post-mortem focused on communication breakdown, not just technical bugs. Afterwards, they set up better Slack alerts and agreed on when to escalate, which meant the next time a glitch hit, the team knew who should lead.
Over in the public sector, things can look a little different. A city government IT department ran a post-mortem after a scheduling system failed just before a busy holiday. Their review included not only IT staff, but people who actually used the system every day. The result? The fixes included better testing—but also simple language guides for frontline workers.
Sometimes, teams in unexpected places use these systems. Even sports teams and sailing crews review big events. The “European Tour” race teams write post-mortems after every leg, sharing what worked and what didn’t around gear, weather, or teamwork. If you’re curious, the European Tour site sometimes shares these stories.
Lessons—and What Happens Next
The biggest takeaway from teams who do post-mortems well is that learning sticks when it’s honest. If you treat them like a checkbox routine, you’ll get a meeting and a Google Doc no one reads. If you treat them like a moment to talk about what actually happened, the team will actually get better.
Sure, there are rough spots. Some teams get stuck talking in circles, or only call post-mortems for disasters. But regular, low-stakes reviews help build trust, so even the tough ones go better.
The odd thing is, once a team gets used to reflecting and sharing openly, they start doing it more naturally. Sometimes people bring up issues before problems explode, because they know the team has each other’s back.
Want to Go Deeper?
For teams looking to really improve post-mortems, some great books include “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni, and “Site Reliability Engineering” (the SRE book from Google).
A few online courses focus on conducting reviews without blame, which might help if your team is gun-shy. Many larger companies also run internal workshops just for this skill.
And if you want more hands-on advice, templates and guides are easy to find. Most are pretty quick reads, but the gold is in sticking to simple principles: keep it honest, keep it blame-free, and always check if the team actually learned something.
You don’t have to fix everything overnight. The real shift comes when teams treat every project—good or bad—as a shot at getting just a little better, together. And for a lot of teams, that’s enough to keep moving forward.