Postmortems and More With J. Paul Reed

J. Paul Reed, a Senior Applied Resilience Engineer at Netflix, shared insights on postmortem best practices during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session hosted by PagerDuty, emphasizing the importance of conducting blameless postmortems to foster a culture of trust and continuous improvement. Reed highlighted the need for a blame-aware approach, which involves recognizing biases that might impede objective analysis of incidents, and stressed the role of managers in maintaining a blameless environment while correcting biases. He advocated for maintaining existing systems to build "tribal knowledge" rather than opting for complete replacements, as this enhances problem-solving capabilities during incidents. Furthermore, Reed recommended setting realistic follow-up tasks post-mortem and conducting these reviews within 72 hours of an incident to minimize cognitive biases and ensure data reliability. These practices, according to Reed, not only improve workflows but also contribute to a productive and understanding organizational culture.