hardScenarioDesignSeniorStaff
How do you conduct a post-mortem after a catastrophic Sev1 outage triggered by a junior engineer's mistake, without succumbing to the blame game?
2 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Analyse the leader's approach to blameless post-mortems, identifying root causes over symptoms, and driving accountability for remediation.
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Likely follow-ups
- How do you keep the post-mortem blameless when the engineer's mistake was a repeat of a nearly identical incident six months earlier?
- How do you prioritise remediation items when the "Five Whys" surfaces ten systemic gaps but the team only has capacity to fix two before the next quarter?
- An executive leaks a version of the incident report externally that names the engineer responsible. How do you respond, and what does it do to the blameless culture you were trying to build?
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