postmortem-authoring

name	postmortem-authoring
description	Authors blameless incident and defect postmortems with timeline, impact, root cause, and corrective actions. Use after incidents or for formal defect write-ups.

Postmortem authoring

Purpose

Produce a blameless, evidence-based postmortem suitable for stakeholders and future search—grounded in logs, deploys, and metrics, not speculation.

When to Use

• User asks for incident postmortem, RCA document, or defect write-up.
• After mitigation when timeline and impact need formal capture.
• Publishing to docs/tickets via google-docs, github, or jira.

When NOT to Use

• Active incident command → lead-incidents, coordinate-incidents first.
• Threat design review → threat-modeling.
• Skill repo authoring → create-skill / publish-skill.

Expected Outcome

• Complete postmortem draft with required sections and explicit unknowns.
• Corrective actions with owners and dates when provided.
• UTC timeline aligned to evidence sources.

Inputs to Gather

• Incident window (UTC), severity, and services affected.
• Alerts, deploys, feature flags, and key log/metric links.
• Customer/revenue/SLO impact estimates.
• Existing tickets or chat threads.

Workflow

1. Collect evidence (alerts, deploys, dashboards) before drafting narrative.
2. Build UTC timeline with source citations.
3. Draft sections below; mark gaps as unknown.
4. Separate proximate vs contributing causes without blaming individuals.
5. Propose corrective actions (quick wins + systemic); request owners/dates.
6. Review for blameless language and sensitive data redaction.

Domain guidance

Produce a blameless document suitable for stakeholders and future search.

Sections

1. Summary — what broke, for whom, how long.
2. Timeline — evidence-based (logs, deploys, alerts), UTC.
3. Impact — users, revenue, SLOs, data.
4. Root cause — mechanism, not individuals; proximate vs contributing.
5. Detection — why it was not caught earlier.
6. Mitigation — what stopped the bleeding.
7. Corrective actions — owned, dated; quick wins and systemic fixes.

Stay factual; mark unknowns explicitly.

Tool Availability Rules

Access	Behavior
Full tool access	Pull evidence from connected tools; publish doc if asked.
Read-only	Draft from user-provided evidence only.
No integration	Draft structure; user supplies links and timestamps.

Related tool sets

• jira
• github
• google-docs

Review / Decision / Execution Criteria

• Every timeline entry traceable to a source.
• Corrective actions are SMART where possible.
• No naming individuals as root cause.

Output Format

Markdown or doc-ready sections per template above, plus optional one-paragraph executive summary.

Quality Bar

• Suitable for exec + engineering audiences.
• Distinguishes facts, hypotheses, and unknowns.

Safety and Boundaries

• Redact customer PII and secrets from excerpts.
• Do not fabricate deploy times or metric values.

Escalation / Dispatch Rules

• SLO policy implications → error-budget-management.
• Ongoing reliability work → monitor-slos.

References

• skills/old_skills.json (postmortem-authoring).
• skills/skill.instruction.md, skills/meta.instructions.md