How to turn postmortems into onboarding improvements
Postmortems often stop at the fix. The leverage is in turning each one into an onboarding upgrade.
Extract the onboarding gap
Ask: what would a new responder not know here?
Common gaps:
- the single truth dashboard
- which mitigation is safe
- who approves risky changes
Convert the gap into a checklist item
Add one bullet to the onboarding checklist and assign an owner. Keep it small enough to review next week.
Update the runbook
If a step was missing or unclear, fix the runbook within 24 hours and add a verification step.
Capture the “first checks” explicitly
If the incident required a special query or dashboard, add it as the first check so the next person doesn’t guess.
Add a micro-drill
Use the incident as a 10-minute scenario for the next onboarding cohort.
If every postmortem produces one onboarding improvement, the system gets stronger every month.