SREPostmortem — Blameless Post-Mortem Template + Evidence Prompts
Interactive blameless post-mortem template with 5 sections × 18 evidence prompts (summary / impact / timeline / root-cause / actions). Per section: prompts that catch missing evidence, anti-blame language linter, action-item owner + due-date validator, learning-extraction prompts. Live readiness score + Markdown export. Drives the postmortem from ad-hoc to consistent without imposing a single template.
What it is
The shape behind a working post-mortem culture. Every team writes them differently; every team’s quality drifts over time. SREPostmortem prototypes the gate that raises the floor — prompts that catch missing evidence, lint that catches blame, validators that catch unowned action items.
What’s in it
- 5 sections × 18 prompts:
- Summary — one-liner, severity + impact-based justification, MTTD + MTTR
- Impact — concrete customer impact, revenue + cost, regulatory + contractual (links APIErrorBudget for SLA credits)
- Timeline — detection, minute-by-minute log, customer-comms log
- Root cause — direct technical cause, contributing factors, 5-whys analysis
- Actions + lessons — action items (owner + due-date + ticket), lessons learned (NOT blame), pre-existing conditions
- Live linters that fire as you type:
- Blame-language detector — flags “idiot / stupid / negligent / should have” and suggests system-focused rewording
- Action-item owner validator — every action item must have an
owner:and a date - Timeline validator — must include explicit timestamps
- 5-whys checker — chain at least 3 levels of why
- Live readiness score — sections complete / prompts answered / blame warnings / missing owners.
- Markdown export — copy-paste-ready postmortem in standard format.
Why this shape
Google SRE Workbook ch. 9 + “Beyond Blame” (Dekker) + Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide all converge: the post-mortem culture matters more than the format. The killer finding the prompts catch: a SEV-1 with action items that have no owners — meaning nothing will actually ship. SOC2 CC7.4 (incident-response evaluation) demands the artifact; this is the gate that raises its quality.
How it ships
Single HTML file, ~16KB. Zero dependencies + zero persistence (session-only). 5 sections × 18 prompts + 4 linters + live readiness scoring + Markdown exporter in 220 lines of vanilla JavaScript.