Questions For Postmortems

Today I learned more questions to ask during a postmortem.

This afternoon I sat in on a postmortem for a production issue. This was my first postmortem with Ro since our site-reliability team had revamped the process.

Included in this process were two questions I am quite familiar with:

1. What went well?
2. What could be improved?

There were two other questions that I have not seen asked before:

1. Where did we get lucky?
2. What were we wrong about?

I really like these latter questions as they force the team to acknowledge the fragility of certain systems - to “turn over the rock” as we say at Ro - and to reconsider our understanding of systems, user behavior, etc.