How SRE Teams Use Postmortems That Actually Change Behavior

In this episode of The Site Reliability Podcast, Lucas and Luna dig into the one incident-documentation practice most teams get wrong: the postmortem. Most postmortems are filed and forgotten. Lucas walks through how Google's SRE team shifted from blame-free to action-oriented postmortems, using a concrete example from their own 2017 Gmail outage. He breaks down the difference between a cause and a contributing factor, and explains why the 'action items' list is usually the weakest part. Luna pushes back on the idea that postmortems should always be public, and they discuss how psychological safety changes whether people actually report the truth. The episode closes with a practical takeaway: if your postmortem doesn't change how you deploy, monitor, or alert, it's a report, not a postmortem. #SRE #SiteReliabilityEngineering #Postmortems #IncidentResponse #BlamelessCulture #GoogleSRE #GmailOutage #ActionItems #PsychologicalSafety #IncidentAnalysis #ReliabilityEngineering #DevOps #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #Technology #LearningFromFailure #ContinuousImprovement #RootCauseAnalysis Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo