Your incident postmortem takes 4 hours. Ours takes 25 minutes. Here's the exact template.

The 25-minute postmortem

If a postmortem takes half a day, your team will stop writing them — and repeat incidents will keep coming back.

The template that survived 200+ incidents at small ops teams

Six sections, each capped:

1. Impact (2 min): users affected, money at risk, SLAs breached. One sentence each.
2. Timeline (5 min): detection -> mitigation -> recovery, with clock times, not "later".
3. What we thought vs what was true (5 min): the #1 fix for repeat incidents.
4. Root cause (5 min): keep asking "what made this possible?" not "who made this mistake?".
5. Action items (5 min): max 5, each with an owner and a date. No owner = delete it.
6. Signals to watch (3 min): the exact metric that would have caught it.

The 3AM test

The template works only if the on-call engineer can fill sections 1-2 during the incident,
from a doc they've opened before. Print it, pin it, rehearse it once.

Steal the pack

The full fill-in-the-blank set (incident report, handover, weekly review, escalation flow)
is in the Ops Starter Kit — free starter templates at
hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit,
full kit $14. Used by solo founders and 3-10 person infra teams.