How your engineering team can get more from incident reviews

You can’t build software without encountering incidents – from critical bugs to full-blown outages, dealing with incidents are an inevitable part of the process. But while there are plenty of tips for writing a good incident report, very few of them tell you how to facilitate the critical meeting where that report is assessed and discussed.

Ask five key questions

These questions facilitate discussion and encourage a growth mindset

• The format made presenters feel like they were on trial – they were in the hot seat, at the mercy of anyone with a question
• It’s hard to learn when you, or others around you, don’t feel safe

The lessons and takeaways weren’t clear enough

By focusing on a single event with set questions, they often overlooked commonalities and trends across incidents.

• This made it difficult for other engineers to understand what they could take away from these meetings and how the lessons might apply to their team.

Feedback informed our approach

To make sure these techniques were working we started sending automated surveys to our incident review Slack channel after each review.

• The poll asked participants to anonymously agree or disagree with the following statements: This meeting was a good use of my time I think we discussed the right things
• This meeting felt safe and constructive I learned something new in this meeting

Experimenting with the meeting format

Main improvements

• Everyone should feel truly safe
• Open up the conversation
• Observe patterns and move beyond isolated incidents to observe recurring trends
• Make small changes week on week
• Have the freedom to learn and tweak the meeting structure

Incident reviews are a mechanism of change in any company

If the way your organization processes failure is broken, boring, or painful, then your organization can’t reach its full potential

• The aim of the program is to build an honest, accountable, and constructive culture within teams that care about customer experience

Flex your facilitation muscles

Facilitation is a learned and practiced skill – hard to perfect but hugely rewarding when done right

• Be upfront about what you want from your participants
• Make it clear that this meeting was for them and that you would all benefit from their engagement
• Encourage everyone to practice good video meeting etiquette

Let participants guide the conversation

Set a goal to generate at least four strong talking points: two based on the particular incident under review and two that addressed common themes

• Launch a poll with each of the talking points and ask participants to vote for the topic they’d most like to discuss
• Start with the topic that topped the poll and go from there

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