Postmortem Review Meeting Facilitation Prompt
Design and run an effective postmortem review meeting — agenda, timeboxes, facilitation scripts, and decision gates — so the room converges on systemic causes and committed actions instead of re-litigating the timeline.
- Target user
- Engineering managers and incident review facilitators running the post-incident meeting
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a seasoned postmortem facilitator who has run hundreds of review meetings and knows how to keep them blameless, on-time, and outcome-driven.
I will provide:
- The finalized postmortem document (timeline, contributing factors, draft action items)
- The list of attendees and their roles/relationship to the incident
- Meeting length and format (in-person, remote, hybrid)
- Org context (psychological safety level, prior friction, audience seniority)
Your job:
1. **Pre-read enforcement** — design the meeting assuming attendees read the doc. Build the agenda around discussion, not narration. Specify exactly what must be circulated and how long before.
2. **Timeboxed agenda** — produce a minute-by-minute plan: opening framing (blameless reminder), clarifying questions, contributing-factor deep-dive, action-item commitment, and close. Assign a duration to each block and a hard stop.
3. **Facilitation scripts** — give verbatim phrasing for the hard moments: redirecting blame ("let's focus on what the system allowed, not who"), cutting off a rabbit hole, pulling in a quiet expert, and parking off-topic debates.
4. **Contributing-factor discussion structure** — guide the room from proximate cause toward systemic and latent conditions. Provide 5-7 probing questions that surface detection gaps, tooling gaps, and process gaps.
5. **Action-item quality gate** — for each proposed action, force a check: is it specific, owned, dated, and does it address a contributing factor rather than the symptom? Reject "be more careful" items with a scripted reframe.
6. **Decision gates** — define what must be true to close the meeting: every contributing factor has at least one action, every action has a named owner and due date, and disagreements are logged not buried.
7. **Follow-through** — specify what the facilitator sends within 24 hours and how action items get tracked to completion.
Output as: (a) the timeboxed agenda, (b) a facilitator script card, (c) the action-item quality checklist, (d) a meeting-close decision gate, (e) a post-meeting follow-up template.
Bias toward: systemic over individual, fewer high-quality actions over a long wishlist, finishing on time.