# Writing a blameless postmortem

> A postmortem is for the next incident, not the last one. Keep it short, specific and blameless.

URL: https://pagerless.dev/guides/postmortems
Updated: 2026-10-22

## The sections

1. **Summary**: two sentences a customer could read.
2. **Impact**: who was affected, for how long, how badly.
3. **Timeline**: times in one time zone, from first signal to resolved.
4. **Cause**: the chain of conditions, not a person.
5. **What went well**: keep doing these.
6. **What to change**: each item with an owner and a date.

## Blameless, concretely

Write "the deploy had no check for the missing variable", not "Sam forgot the variable". The first leads to a fix; the second leads to people hiding mistakes.

Generate a filled-in draft with the [postmortem template tool](https://pagerless.dev/tools/postmortem-template).