There’s a good chance you’re familiar with the general concept of a postmortem: a meeting that happens after an incident, to determine root causes and remediation steps.

But if you’ve never done one before, the prospect can seem a bit daunting. This is why I’ve written the Zero-prep Postmortem guide. It’s written with the intention of being followed the first time you read it. That is, if you find yourself sitting in a conference room to do a postmortem, and you have no idea where to begin, you can just follow the guide as you read it, and conduct a useful postmortem with zero preparation.

Of course, if you have time to read it before hand, you’ll enter your postmortem with a better sense of the meeting, and can potentially get more out of it. But this is optional.

If you’ve never done a postmortem before, I encourage you to bookmark the page. The next time your team experiences an incident, you’ll be prepared to guide them through a successful postmortem.