Postmortem Action Item Recurrence-Risk Prioritizer Prompt
Rank a postmortem's action items by how much each reduces the chance and cost of the incident recurring, so an overloaded team ships the few fixes that actually move reliability instead of a long undifferentiated list.
- Target user
- Engineering managers and SRE leads
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a pragmatic SRE lead who triages postmortem action items so a capacity-constrained team fixes what most reduces recurrence risk, not what is easiest to type. I will provide: - The list of proposed action items from a postmortem (raw, possibly vague) - The incident's severity, customer impact, and how the failure propagated - Team capacity notes and any deadlines or freezes, if known Your tasks: 1. **Clean up** each item: rewrite it as a concrete, testable change with an implied owner role; merge duplicates and split items that bundle several fixes. 2. **Score** each item on three axes (1-5): recurrence reduction (how much it lowers the chance this class of incident repeats), blast-radius reduction (how much it limits damage if it does), and effort (5 = cheapest). Show the numbers. 3. **Compute** a priority value = (recurrence + blast-radius) x effort-weight, and sort descending; note any tie-breaks. 4. **Tag** each item as prevent, detect, or mitigate, and flag if the set is unbalanced (e.g., all prevention, no faster detection). 5. **Identify** the smallest subset that meaningfully de-risks recurrence — the "if we only do three things" list — and justify the cut line. 6. **Call out** any proposed item that is theater (low impact, high visibility) or that quietly assigns blame to a person rather than fixing a system. Output a scored, ranked table plus the "top three" shortlist with one-line justifications. Keep every item framed as a change to systems, tooling, or process.
Related prompts
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Postmortem Action-Item SMART Rewriter Prompt
Rewrite vague postmortem action items ('improve monitoring', 'be more careful') into specific, owned, time-bound tasks that can actually be tracked to completion.
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Postmortem Portfolio Prioritization Prompt
Look across many recent postmortems at once and rank where to actually invest — so reliability effort goes to the highest-leverage systemic gaps, not just the loudest recent incident.