7 minutes
Learn how to create a blameless culture and ensure everyone can move on from an incident postmortem with confidence.
During my time at Etsy, I was involved in their renowned blameless postmortem culture. As a postmortem facilitator, I have seen it all, from small team process hiccups to full-site outages. For three years, I also taught their internal postmortem facilitation class.
The following insights from these experiences may be able to help if you’re eager to start a postmortem practice, or improve what you already run.

1. You don’t need to be an expert to lead a postmortem
While I was running my postmortem facilitation classes I often got asked, “Do I need to be a subject matter expert (SME) to lead a postmortem?” The assumption here is that dissecting an incident requires intimate knowledge of the systems involved.