How One CTO Uses the Five Whys on Incidents to Find Root Causes

In this episode of Tech Leadership with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore a practical incident analysis technique: the Five Whys. They look at how one CTO, Sarah Chen at a mid-size fintech company, applies this method not just to technical failures but also to process breakdowns. Lucas breaks down a real example from Sarah's team where a database outage traced back to a missing peer review in a deployment script—revealing that the real root cause was a cultural norm around urgent fixes. Luna challenges whether the Five Whys can oversimplify complex systems, and Lucas shares countermeasures like branching into multiple causal chains. The hosts discuss how the technique pairs with blameless postmortems, why it's most effective when done in writing, and how one question—'What would prevent this from happening again?'—keeps the exercise focused on action. A concrete, tool-agnostic episode for engineering leaders looking to improve incident response. #FiveWhys #RootCauseAnalysis #IncidentManagement #EngineeringLeadership #CTO #TechLeadership #BlamelessPostmortem #SRE #ReliabilityEngineering #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #Technology #TechLeadershipWithFexingo #IncidentAnalysis #ContinuousImprovement #DevOps #SystemThinking #EngineeringCulture Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo