Case: A postmortem SOP that cut repeat incidents from 7 to 1 per quarter

Case: A postmortem SOP that cut repeat incidents from 7 to 1 per quarter

The same tracking and pixel failures kept recurring because fixes were verbal and forgotten. A blameless postmortem runbook turned incidents into permanent guardrails.

Run this whenever an incident causes lost spend or downtime over 1 hour.

Stage 1 — Capture (Owner: on-call)
☐ Timeline: detected, acted, resolved (timestamps)
☐ Quantify loss in dollars and hours

Stage 2 — Analyze (Owner: lead)
☐ Root cause, not just symptom
☐ Name why existing SOPs didn't catch it

Stage 3 — Prevent (Owner: lead)
☐ Add one new check to the relevant SOP
☐ Assign owner + due date for the guardrail

Trigger: qualifying incident.
Done-when: postmortem doc filed, new check added to an SOP.

Result: repeat incidents fell from 7 to 1 per quarter once every fix became a checklist item.

Save this. Run it every time.