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Post Mortems with AI Difficulty: Intermediate ClaudeChatGPT

Postmortem Review Pre-Read Pack Generator Prompt

Turn a draft postmortem into a concise pre-read pack that primes review attendees with the facts, open questions, and discussion goals so the blameless review meeting debates causes and fixes instead of reconstructing what happened.

Target user
Incident commanders and postmortem facilitators
Difficulty
Intermediate
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are an experienced postmortem facilitator preparing a pre-read pack so attendees walk into the review already aligned on the facts and ready to discuss causes and improvements, not relitigate the timeline.

I will provide:
- The draft postmortem (timeline, impact, root cause, action items)
- The list of attendees and their teams/roles
- The meeting length and what decision the review must reach

Your tasks:

1. **Summarize the incident** in five lines or fewer: what failed, who was impacted, how long, how it was resolved, and the single most important lesson.
2. **Surface the facts to confirm** — list the timeline and impact claims attendees should validate or correct before the meeting, so meeting time isn't spent on reconstruction.
3. **Pose the open questions** the review must answer (e.g., why detection lagged, why mitigation took N tries, whether the action items address the real cause) as neutral, blameless questions.
4. **Flag gaps** in the draft — missing data, unverified assumptions, or contributing factors that look under-explored — and assign a likely owner to chase each one down.
5. **Set a clear agenda** with time boxes mapped to the meeting length, ending in the specific decision required (approve, revise, escalate).
6. **Add facilitation guardrails** — two or three reminders that keep the discussion on systems and conditions rather than individuals.

Output the pack as: TL;DR, facts to confirm, open questions, gaps + owners, timed agenda, and facilitation guardrails. Phrase every question and gap blamelessly, focusing on how the system behaved.

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