DEV Community

Hive80-lab
Hive80-lab

Posted on

The post-incident review template people actually fill out

#devops #sre #management #postmortem

The post-incident review template people actually fill out

Most post-incident reviews die in a Google Doc nobody opens twice. The action items are vague ("improve monitoring"), the timeline takes two hours to reconstruct, and the tone quietly assigns blame.

A review template works when it's boring, short, and answers exactly three questions: what happened, what made it possible, and what one change makes it impossible again.

The 5-section template (30 minutes, one page)

1. Timeline (10 min). Table with four columns: time (UTC), event, source, confidence. Only events with a source count — memory is not a source. Two rows minimum: detection time and resolution start.

2. Impact in one sentence. "For 47 minutes, EU customers could not check out. ~1,900 sessions affected. No data loss." If you can't write this, you don't understand your own incident yet.

3. Contributing factors (not causes). List 3–5 conditions that were true before the incident: the stale runbook, the missing alert, the deploy Friday 4pm culture. "Human error" is banned — it explains nothing and stops the analysis.

4. The one fix. Pick a single change that would have prevented or caught this specific incident. Not five. One. Name the owner and the date it ships.

5. What we'd tell the next team. Two sentences of hard-won context. This is the section that gets read.

What kills reviews

  • Blame drift: the phrase "the engineer should have" ends the learning.
  • Ten action items: they become a graveyard. One shipped fix beats ten tracked tickets.
  • No reviewer from outside the incident: fresh eyes catch the second-order stuff.

Why this works for small teams

Teams of 1–50 don't need an SRE process — they need a habit light enough to survive a bad week. Thirty minutes, one page, one shipped fix. That's the whole game.

This exact template ships in the Ops Starter Kit Vol. 2 (advanced incident response & comms), alongside the escalation ladder and the status page playbook: https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit-vol-2

If you're starting from zero, the First 30 Minutes checklist is free: https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/first-30-minutes — and the full starter kit is 30% off this month with coupon HIVE-LAUNCH30:

Top comments (0)