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Postmortem

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Also called Incident review, retrospective

What is Postmortem?

A blameless review written after an incident to explain what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it from happening again.

A postmortem focuses on learning, not blaming. It records the timeline, impact, contributing factors, and action items so the team can improve systems and response habits.

How it relates to Orbit

In Coordinator Mode, Gate 2 is a claim-by-claim review of what each subtask actually delivered. See Coordinator Mode for details.

When you would use it

You use a postmortem after a serious incident or repeated failure that deserves careful analysis and follow-through.

Common operations

  • Reviewing outages
  • Capturing lessons learned
  • Tracking follow-up fixes

Related terms

Where this is taught

No learning path uses this term yet. Browse the Learning Atlas for guided sequences through related ideas.