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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