The Major Incident Postmortem Playbook
The Postmortem Playbook Every On-Call Engineer Wishes They Had Earlier.
The complete framework for turning your P0s and P1s into your strongest reliability signal — from blameless walkthrough to closed action items.
Used by SRE and DevOps teams at Razorpay, IndiaMart, Electrum Payments, and 1,000+ engineering orgs worldwide.
What separates teams with 70% MTTR reduction from teams still fighting the same fires?
It's not the tooling. It's what happens after the war room closes.
The postmortem that goes one ‘why’ deeper than "human error." The action item with a real owner and a real date. The contributing factor that — if you'd caught it last time — means this incident never happens again.
This is the framework for that postmortem.
What You'll Walk Away With
Secure the timeline — What to capture in the 24-hour window before details fade and engineers move on.
Run a blameless walkthrough that works — The exact facilitation moves that get engineers talking honestly, including the ones paged at 3am.
Find contributing factors, not scapegoats — The six-category framework for finding the process gaps and observability blind spots that make recurrence inevitable.
Write action items that close — Three sharp, owned, time-bound commitments. Not twelve things nobody touches.
"Xurrent IMR's support team was extremely helpful and was there to answer all of our questions during our trial. They even went the extra mile by connecting us with a dedicated developer resource to help us build on top of their offerings. Truly one of the easiest tooling migrations we have ever gone through. "
— Mudassir Razvi, Senior Engineering Manager - DevOps at Razorpay.
Link to case study - https://www.xurrent.com/success-stories/razorpay-reduces-incident-management-costs
The teams closing the loop aren't using different infrastructure. They're running a better process.
Every P0 without a structured postmortem is a missed SLO waiting to happen. Every vague action item is the same contributing factor, queued up for next quarter.
This is that process. And it's free.
Your next major incident is coming.
Make sure your team comes out of it stronger.
Download the Major Incident Postmortem Playbook today.
Includes: annotated template · completed sample P0 postmortem · facilitator checklist · action item tracker No second form. No CC. Just the guide.
