Post-Mortem Best Practices

Table of Contents Introduction: When Production Breaks Understanding Incident Severity Levels The PM’s Role During Incidents Communication Templates for Stakeholders Coordinating with Engineering During Crises Post-Incident Review Best Practices Building Incident Response Playbooks Preventing Incidents: PM’s Proactive Role Learning from Incidents: Continuous Improvement Incident Response Checklist for PMs Introduction: When Production Breaks It’s 2:47 AM. Your phone screams with the unmistakable sound of your PagerDuty alert. You fumble for it, eyes barely adjusting to the harsh screen light. The message is brief but terrifying: “SEV1 - Payment processing down - All users affected.” ...

📚 Table of Contents The 3 AM Call That Changed How I Think About Incidents What Actually Happens During a Production Incident Your Role as PM: What You Should and Shouldn’t Do Incident Severity Levels: The Framework That Matters The First 30 Minutes: Your Action Checklist Stakeholder Communication: Templates That Work The War Room: How to Participate Without Getting in the Way Escalation: When and How to Raise the Alarm Resolution and Recovery: Getting Back to Normal Post-Mortems: The Real Learning Opportunity Building Incident Resilience: What to Do Before Things Break Common PM Mistakes During Incidents Your Incident Readiness Checklist The Bottom Line The 3 AM Call That Changed How I Think About Incidents March 2024. My phone rang at 3:17 AM. ...