How SRE Teams Use Post-Incident Reviews as Learning Tools

Episode 58 of The Site Reliability Podcast with Fexingo digs into post-incident reviews — not as blame sessions or compliance checkboxes, but as structured learning mechanisms. Lucas and Luna examine Google's seminal 2016 Titan key outage to illustrate how root cause analysis misses the point if teams don't ask 'why' five times. They discuss the difference between finding a 'root cause' and understanding systemic contributors, how to write blameless incident reports, and why the best SRE teams treat each P0 as a free systems audit. Concrete examples from Google, Etsy, and the 2023 Amazon Kinesis outage show how post-incident reviews reduce mean time to recover and surface recurring failure patterns. The episode also covers common traps — like over-focus on code fixes over process gaps, or documenting the review but never acting on it. Listeners walk away with a five-step template for running their own post-incident review that actually prevents the next outage. #PostIncidentReview #BlamelessCulture #SRE #SiteReliabilityEngineering #IncidentManagement #RootCauseAnalysis #LearningFromFailure #GoogleTitanKey #Etsy #AmazonKinesis #P0 #MTTR #SystemsThinking #ResilienceEngineering #IncidentResponse #Technology #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo