Postmortems

Learn from every incident with structured, blameless postmortems — generated by AI or written by your team.

AI-Generated Postmortems

After an incident is resolved, NotifyHero's AI generates a complete postmortem draft:

  • Timeline — every action, notification, and escalation in chronological order
  • Impact summary — duration, affected services, customer impact
  • Root cause analysis — correlates with recent deploys, config changes, and similar past incidents
  • Contributing factors — what made the incident worse or slower to resolve
  • Action items — specific, assignable follow-ups to prevent recurrence

The AI draft appears within minutes of resolution. Review, edit, and publish.

AI postmortems are drafts, not verdicts. They give you a 90% head start — your team adds the last 10% of context.

Creating a Postmortem

From an Incident

  1. Open a resolved incident
  2. Click Create Postmortem
  3. Choose: AI-generated draft or blank template
  4. Edit in the built-in Markdown editor
  5. Assign reviewers

From Scratch

Go to Incidents → Postmortems → New Postmortem and link it to one or more incidents.

Postmortem Templates

Customize templates to match your team's process:

Default Template

## Summary
[What happened, when, and what was the impact?]

## Timeline
[Chronological list of key events]

## Root Cause
[What caused the incident?]

## Contributing Factors
[What made it worse or slower to detect/resolve?]

## Impact
- Duration: [X hours Y minutes]
- Services affected: [list]
- Customers affected: [number or percentage]
- Revenue impact: [if applicable]

## Action Items
| Action | Owner | Due Date | Priority |
|--------|-------|----------|----------|
| [action] | [person] | [date] | [P1-P4] |

## Lessons Learned
[What went well? What didn't? What was lucky?]

Create custom templates at Settings → Postmortems → Templates.

Action Items

Every postmortem should produce concrete action items:

  • Assignee — who owns this action
  • Due date — when it should be done
  • Priority — P1 (this week) through P4 (this quarter)
  • Status — open, in progress, completed
  • Linked ticket — auto-create in Jira, Linear, or GitHub Issues

Track all open action items across postmortems at Incidents → Action Items.

Tip: Block postmortem closure until all P1 action items have linked tickets. Enable this at Settings → Postmortems → Require Linked Tickets.

Review Workflow

Postmortems go through a review cycle:

  1. Draft — author writes or edits AI draft
  2. In Review — assigned reviewers provide feedback
  3. Approved — meets your team's quality bar
  4. Published — visible to the organization

Set required approvers per team or service. Postmortems can't be published without approval.

Blameless Culture

NotifyHero enforces blameless postmortems:

  • No individual blame — focus on systems, processes, and tooling
  • Language analysis — AI flags blaming language ("Bob should have...") and suggests neutral alternatives
  • Psychological safety — the goal is learning, not punishment

"The postmortem is not about finding who caused the incident. It's about finding what caused the incident and making sure it doesn't happen again."

Sharing and Visibility

Control who sees postmortems:

  • Team only — visible to the owning team
  • Organization — visible to everyone in your org
  • Public — publishable to a public URL (for transparency-focused orgs)

Postmortems can be exported as PDF or Markdown for external sharing.

Metrics

Track your postmortem practice:

  • Postmortem completion rate — % of P1/P2 incidents with postmortems
  • Time to postmortem — hours from resolution to published postmortem
  • Action item completion rate — % of action items completed on time
  • Repeat incidents — incidents with the same root cause as a previous postmortem

View these at Analytics.