Most postmortems are written to be filed, not read.
You've seen them. Bloated documents. Endless bullet points. Vague timelines. Copy-pasted template headings left blank. A few Slack screenshots dropped in for effect. Maybe a half-hearted 5 Whys thrown in because someone on the team once read about it in a Google SRE book.
Then the incident fades. The doc disappears into Confluence. And the lesson is never applied.
This isn't a writing problem. It's a signal problem.
Postmortems should be a source of insight, not noise. They should drive change. They should earn attention.
Here's how to write postmortems that people actually read, and more importantly, why you should automate as much of it as possible.
Templates are helpful starting points. But when teams blindly fill them out, they produce zombie docs. Technically complete but practically useless.
Before writing anything, ask:
Writing for action is very different from writing for compliance.
Executives will not read six pages of technical details. Neither will future-you six months from now.
Start with a one-paragraph summary that includes:
If you only write this, and write it well, your postmortem already has more value than most.
Engineers love stories. But a postmortem isn't a novel. It's a forensic timeline.
Focus on:
Bonus points if you show what could have helped detect or mitigate the issue earlier.
The first cause is rarely the real cause. If your 5 Whys only goes two layers deep, you're just scratching the surface.
Great RCAs explore contributing factors across:
Each "why" should make the problem feel more solvable. If it leads to "engineer made a mistake," dig again.
Postmortems are often shared in long meetings, across multiple stakeholders. Don't make people hunt for the good stuff.
Use:
Every word has to earn its place.
No one cares what you said you would do. They care what actually changed.
Track action item status. Assign owners. Set due dates. Revisit them. If your org never closes postmortem actions, stop writing them down and pretending.
Or better yet, use a tool that tracks this for you.
This is the part where tooling makes a real difference.
You don't need a human to:
That's busywork. Let software do it.
Then let your team focus on the analysis. The hard part. The part that matters.
Most postmortems are treated like a tax. Something teams do under pressure, then forget. The result is docs nobody trusts and lessons nobody applies.
The fix is not better templates. The fix is higher signal and less noise.
You can get there with better habits. You can get there faster with automation.
Better yet, you can stop writing postmortems entirely. Let an intelligent agent do the heavy lifting while your team learns continuously.
That's why we built COEhub.
Check it out. And stop writing postmortems that die unread.