Incident Review Template for Product Managers

Within 48 hours while details are fresh. If you wait a week, people forget the nuances of what happened, Slack messages get buried, and the timeline becomes unreliable. Schedule the review meeting before the incident channel is closed.

Everyone who was involved in the response, plus the engineering manager for the affected system. Include the PM if the incident had user-facing impact. Keep the group small (5-8 people). Larger groups lead to less candid discussion.

Maintain a recurrence log. When an incident happens, check if it matches a previous incident type. If the same class of incident recurs after action items were supposedly completed, the action items were insufficient. This is not a failure of the responders. It is a signal that the fix was too shallow.

Mitigation reduces the user impact (e.g., rolling back a deployment, disabling a feature flag, switching to a backup). Resolution fixes the underlying cause (e.g., deploying a patched version, adding the missing pagination). An incident can be mitigated in minutes but take days to fully resolve. ---