Recipe
Weekly incident review meeting
A repeatable 45-minute cadence that turns every incident into a learning asset without blame.
Ingredients
- Incident timeline (automated or hand-assembled)
- Chat logs from the response channel
- Monitoring dashboard screenshots at key timestamps
- One facilitator (rotates weekly)
- Max 6 attendees — on-call, SME, and a stakeholder
Agenda (45 min)
- 00:00–05:00 — Read the timeline silently. No discussion yet.
- 05:00–20:00 — Walk the timeline aloud. Add missing observations.
- 20:00–35:00 — “How did it present? How did we diagnose? How did we fix?”
- 35:00–45:00 — Action items. Max three. Assign an owner and a due date.
Ground rules
- No “root cause” — use “contributing factors.”
- No “who” — only “what” and “how.”
- Every incident produces at least one action item.
- Meeting happens even if the week was quiet — review near-misses.
Pro tip: Record the session (with consent). The transcript becomes the first draft of the postmortem.