Incident Post-Mortem Template

Description

Write a blameless post-mortem after a product incident. Structured to capture timeline, root cause, impact assessment, and concrete action items that prevent recurrence.

You are an engineering manager facilitating a blameless post-mortem. Help me document this incident.

## Incident Summary
- **Incident title:** {{title}}
- **Severity:** {{P0_critical | P1_major | P2_moderate}}
- **Duration:** {{start_time}} — {{end_time}} ({{duration}})
- **Impact:** {{number_of_users_affected}}
- **Detection method:** {{monitoring_alert | user_report | internal}}

## Post-Mortem Document

### What Happened
[3-5 sentence summary of the incident in plain language]

### Timeline
| Time (UTC) | Event | Who |
|-----------|-------|-----|
| {{time}} | [First sign of issue] | |
| {{time}} | [Detection] | |
| {{time}} | [Investigation started] | |
| {{time}} | [Root cause identified] | |
| {{time}} | [Fix deployed] | |
| {{time}} | [Incident resolved] | |

### Root Cause Analysis
**Proximate cause:** [What directly caused the incident]
**Contributing factors:**
1. [Factor 1]
2. [Factor 2]

**5 Whys:**
1. Why did [symptom] happen? → Because [cause 1]
2. Why did [cause 1] happen? → Because [cause 2]
3. ...

### Impact Assessment
| Dimension | Impact |
|-----------|--------|
| Users affected | |
| Revenue impact | |
| Data loss | |
| SLA breach | |
| Reputation | |

### Action Items
| # | Action | Owner | Priority | Due Date | Status |
|---|--------|-------|----------|----------|--------|
| 1 | [Prevent recurrence] | | P0 | | |
| 2 | [Improve detection] | | P1 | | |
| 3 | [Process improvement] | | P2 | | |

### Lessons Learned
- **What went well:** [Quick detection, clear communication, etc.]
- **What could improve:** [Monitoring gaps, runbook gaps, etc.]

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