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Planning & Processnoun · /ˌpoʊstˈmɔːrtem/

post-mortem

In simple English

In tech companies, a post-mortem (often called a postmortem or post mortem) is a formal or semi-formal discussion that occurs after a significant event—typically a production outage, failed deployment, critical bug, or missed deadline. The goal is not to blame individuals but to understand the root causes and improve processes. During a post-mortem, the team reviews the timeline of events, discusses contributing factors, and agrees on action items to prevent recurrence. This practice is central to incident management and continuous improvement in software engineering. Post-mortems are usually documented and shared with relevant stakeholders, creating institutional knowledge that helps the entire team learn from mistakes.

Understand what a post-mortem meeting is and how it is used in tech to learn from failures and improve processes.

At a glanceCEFR B2
Commonness4/5
Versatility4/5
FormalityCasualFormalNeutral
Spoken ↔ WrittenSpokenWrittenBoth
Directness ↔ DiplomaticDirectDiplomaticNeutral
RegionUS and UK
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Say it like this

✓We need to schedule a post-mortem on this outage.
✓Let us do a post-mortem to see what we can improve.
✓The post-mortem revealed several underlying issues.

Real examples

in a standup

"After last week's incident, we held a post-mortem and identified three action items to prevent it from happening again."

in a team meeting

"The post-mortem showed that we needed better monitoring and alerting on the payment service."

in a code review

"We should do a post-mortem on this feature rollout to understand why performance degraded."

Don't say this

Handle with care. Do not use post-mortem to refer to a literal autopsy in medical contexts when discussing software issues. In tech, it is always about analyzing what went wrong after an incident.

✕We post-mortemed the project last week.
✓We held a post-mortem on the project last week.— Post-mortem is typically used as a noun (held, conducted, scheduled), not as a verb with -ed ending in standard tech English.
✕The post-mortem was very negative and blamed John for the failure.
✓The post-mortem focused on process improvements rather than assigning blame to individuals.— Effective post-mortems are blameless and focus on systems and processes, not individuals.

Other forms

noun

post-mortem

"We scheduled a post-mortem meeting for Thursday afternoon."

noun (attributive)

post-mortem

"The post-mortem analysis revealed several critical gaps in our monitoring."

Often used with

conduct / hold / schedule a post-mortemThese are the most common verbs used with post-mortem.
post-mortem meetingThe meeting where the post-mortem discussion takes place.
post-mortem reportThe documented findings and action items from the post-mortem.
blameless post-mortemA post-mortem focused on processes and systems rather than individual fault.

Similar words

incident reviewMore formal term; often used interchangeably but slightly broader in scope.
retrospectiveCommon in Agile teams; usually refers to project review rather than incident response.
root cause analysis (RCA)Emphasizes finding the underlying cause; post-mortem includes broader discussion and action items.

Opposites

planning meetingprospective review

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Practice

Try it

4 quick exercises

Pick the most natural phrasing

1. Your team experienced a production outage. How do you naturally say you will review it?

Complete the sentence

2. After the deployment failure, the team _______ a _______ to identify root causes and prevent future issues.

Spot the mistake

3. Which sentence uses post-mortem incorrectly?

Rewrite naturally

4. Rewrite this in natural tech English using post-mortem: We need to have a meeting to figure out why the API broke and how to stop it from breaking again.

Questions

Quick poll

Have you said "post-mortem" in a standup this week?

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