Your CTO has asked you to implement a postmortem policy on every incident for internal use. You want to define what a good postmortem is to ensure that the policy is successful at your company. What s

While understanding the cause is essential, a good postmortem should focus on systemic failures and prevention, not identifying a specific 'person or team' responsible, as this goes against the blame-free culture of SRE postmortems.

Identifying how the incident could have been prevented is valuable, but explicitly identifying a specific 'person or team' responsible for the incident is counterproductive to a blame-free postmortem culture and organizational learning.

A good postmortem must clearly state the severity and impact of the incident to properly contextualize the event, and crucially, it must focus on concrete actions and systemic changes to prevent recurrence, embodying a blame-free culture and driving continuous improvement.

Including how the incident was resolved and what caused it is necessary, but this option omits critical elements like comprehensive prevention steps and broad stakeholder involvement, which are vital for a successful postmortem policy that drives improvement and learning.

Involving all incident participants in postmortem authoring fosters a shared understanding, ensures comprehensive capture of perspectives and details, and promotes a blame-free culture. Sharing the postmortem broadly ensures lessons learned are disseminated throughout the organization, maximizing their impact and preventing similar incidents across teams.