# The post-mortem problem

DevFeed: [The post-mortem problem](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-post-mortem-problem-12034.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/the-post-mortem-problem>)

Author: incident.io

Published: 2026-03-04T19:36:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [Post Mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/post-mortem.md>), [Software Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software-engineering.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>)

Tags: [culture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/culture.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>), [software-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-engineering.md>), [writing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/writing.md>)

## AI overview

The article argues that post-mortems often fail because they become compliance artifacts instead of useful parts of the incident response lifecycle. It examines timing, overly demanding templates, the difficulty of post-mortem writing, and organizational culture, emphasizing that effective documents preserve context, explain technical events clearly, and support learning.

## Source excerpt

Post-mortems are one of the most consistently underperforming rituals in software engineering. Most teams do them. Most teams know theirs aren't working. And most teams reach for the same diagnosis: the templates are too long, nobody has time, nobody reads them anyway.