Blameless Postmortem Template for Web Agencies

A blameless postmortem examines how the system, process, tooling, assumptions, and operating context combined to produce an incident. It assumes people acted reasonably with the information and incentives available at the time, while still assigning clear ownership for corrective work.

For a small web agency, the meeting can take 45–60 minutes and the document can be concise. The value comes from evidence, honest detection and response review, and a small set of completed actions—not from enterprise ceremony.

At a glance

1. Define postmortem triggers before incidents.
2. Stabilise service before starting analysis.
3. Name a facilitator and document owner.
4. Build the timeline from evidence, not memory.
5. Separate impact, trigger, mechanism, and contributing conditions.
6. Review detection, classification, communication, mitigation, and recovery.
7. Identify what helped as well as what failed.
8. Create a few specific actions with owners, dates, and verification.
9. share learning at the appropriate level.
10. review action completion until closed.

Blameless does not mean accountability-free

Blameless practice removes shame from the investigation. It does not remove:

• responsibility for unsafe behaviour;
• contractual or management decisions;
• security, legal, or HR processes;
• ownership of corrective actions;
• consequences for deliberate policy violations.

Keep those processes separate from the technical learning session where appropriate. People will hide weak signals if the retrospective is designed as a trial.

Define postmortem triggers

Examples:

• P1 and selected P2 incidents;
• material customer-visible downtime or degradation;
• data loss, corruption, duplication, or exposure risk;
• emergency rollback, failover, or restore;
• client discovered the problem before monitoring;
• response or recovery exceeded an agreed threshold;
• repeated or near-miss event;
• any participant or client service owner requests one.

Google SRE lists user-visible impact, data loss, on-call intervention, long resolution, and monitoring failure among common postmortem triggers.

Prepare the session

Invite the people who understand the event and the owners able to change the system. Avoid turning the meeting into a large audience performance.

Bring:

• client incident report or incident record;
• monitoring and application evidence;
• deployment and configuration history;
• provider communication;
• timeline of client/status updates;
• previous related incidents and actions;
• service map and ownership.

The facilitator should challenge unsupported statements and redirect personal blame into conditions and controls.

Copyable postmortem template

Blameless postmortem

Incident ID: [ID]
Service/client: [value]
Date: [UTC]
Facilitator: [role]
Document owner: [role]
Participants: [roles]

1. Summary

[What happened and how service recovered.]

2. Impact

• Affected journeys/users/regions:
• Impact window:
• Data/integrity/security impact:
• Measurement limitations:

3. Detection

• First evidence:
• Alert/notification:
• Incident declaration:
• What monitoring missed or detected well:

4. Timeline

5. Trigger and failure mechanism

Trigger: [initiating event]
Failure mechanism: [how impact was produced]

6. Contributing conditions

• Technical:
• Process:
• Ownership/communication:
• Testing/monitoring:
• Workload/timing/provider:

7. What helped

• [control, person, fallback, tool, or decision]

8. What made response harder

• [condition and evidence]

9. Decision review

• Which decisions were reasonable with information available?
• Which information arrived too late?
• Which authority or runbook was unclear?

10. Actions

11. Learning to share

[Audience, redactions, and concise lesson.]

12. Action review

Next review: [date]
Close condition: [all critical actions verified / accepted risk]

Ask better questions
Replace:

• “Who broke production?” with “What allowed one action to create this blast radius?”
• “Why did they not follow the runbook?” with “Was the runbook findable, current, safe, and practised?”
• “Why did monitoring fail?” with “Which user outcome was not represented by a signal?”
• “Why was the client angry?” with “Which expectation or update cadence was unclear?”
• “Why did rollback take so long?” with “Which dependency, access, data, or decision delayed rollback?”

Trigger, cause, and contributing conditions

Example:

• Trigger: routine plugin deployment.
• Failure mechanism: changed JavaScript prevented checkout submission.
• Contributing conditions: no browser-level checkout smoke test; release during a campaign; monitor checked only server response; rollback approval contact was unavailable.

“Plugin update caused it” is too shallow to prevent recurrence.

Review all phases

Before the incident

• What risk was known?
• What controls existed?
• Was the change reviewed and recoverable?

Detection and classification

• Who noticed first?
• Did severity reflect business impact?
• Which signal was missing or noisy?

Response and communication

• Were roles clear?
• Did the team make multiple conflicting changes?
• Were client updates factual and timely?

Recovery

• Was mitigation reversible?
• Did recovery include downstream systems and data?
• Were temporary access and suppressions removed?

Choose actions by control type

Balance:

• Prevent: safer configuration, staged rollout, least privilege.
• Detect: journey check, reconciliation, improved alert.
• Mitigate: feature flag, degraded mode, documented rollback.
• Recover: tested backup, ownership, access, runbook.

Avoid making training the only action when the system can be made safer by design.

Example: repeated certificate incident

The agency initially writes, “The account manager forgot renewal.” The postmortem reveals that ownership existed only in a private calendar, the registrar account belonged to an old client employee, renewal email went to an unmonitored mailbox, and no independent expiry alert existed.

Actions become: transfer ownership, create a shared renewal record, add 60/30/14-day monitoring, and test the escalation contact. The lesson is systemic and verifiable.

Common mistakes

• writing the postmortem before facts are stable;
• allowing managers to search for a culprit;
• reducing cause to the last human action;
• ignoring what worked;
• creating dozens of vague actions;
• assigning every action to “the team”;
• never reviewing completion;
• publishing sensitive security or client information too broadly;
• performing the ceremony but not changing the system.

FAQ

Should the client attend the postmortem?

Usually hold an internal learning session first. Invite the client when shared systems, decisions, or trust make joint learning useful. The client incident report remains a separate deliverable.

How soon should the postmortem happen?

After service and immediate evidence are stable, while memory and context remain available. Do not let a fixed deadline force an invented root cause.

Is “root cause” always singular?

No. Complex incidents commonly have multiple interacting contributing conditions. Use precise language rather than forcing one cause.

How many actions should a small agency create?

Prefer a few high-value, owned, testable actions. Capacity is part of reliability.

Sources and further reading

• Google SRE: Postmortem Culture
• Google SRE Workbook: Postmortem Culture
• Google SRE: Managing Incidents

Reviewed: 8 August 2026.

Next: Managing 10, 50, and 100 client websites and website incident report template.

Pingvera data can show when an external symptom began, which checks failed, and when recovery stabilised. It cannot decide the organisational lessons; that remains the team's job.

Originally published at pingvera.com.