BrettFullmer: Publish The Postmortem (Churn and Save Retros) page

2026-09-01T17:04:21Z

Publish The Postmortem (Churn and Save Retros) page

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Part of [[The Playbook]]. This is the page that turns everything else here from a one-time setup into an actual system. Without it, [[Observability (Customer Health Scoring)|health scores]] go stale, [[The Play Library|plays]] never improve, and the same account failure mode repeats with a different customer's name on it every quarter.

==Blameless, and mean it==

The point of a postmortem is not to find who missed the signal — it's to find what the system missed, because a person will always be the last link in a chain of things the system should have caught earlier. A postmortem culture that assigns blame teaches CSMs to hide problems until they're unrecoverable, which produces exactly the surprise churn the whole system exists to prevent.

==Run one after every [[Incident Response for At-Risk Accounts|incident]], win or loss==

* '''Timeline''' — what happened, in order, from first available signal to close
* '''Root cause, not proximate cause''' — "the champion left" is proximate; "we had no relationship with anyone else at the account" is the root cause, and it's the one worth fixing
* '''What the health score caught or missed''' — did the signal fire in time, or did the score need an input it didn't have
* '''What the play caught or missed''' — did the matching play exist, did it trigger correctly, did the owner follow it
* '''What changes as a result''' — a new play, an adjusted trigger threshold, a new [[Observability (Customer Health Scoring)|health score]] input, a revised [[SLOs for Customer Outcomes|SLO]]. A postmortem with no resulting change didn't do its job.

==Don't skip the wins==

Most CS orgs only postmortem the losses. That means the org only ever learns what fails, never what specifically worked — so a save that happened because one CSM improvised something clever never becomes a documented play, and the next CSM who hits the same signal starts from zero again. Review saves with the same rigor as churns; the output is a new entry in [[The Play Library]] instead of a fix to an existing one.

==Where the output goes==

Every postmortem should produce at least one concrete edit to another page in [[The Playbook]] — that's the test for whether it was worth running. If a postmortem's conclusion is "nothing to change," either the incident really was a one-off, or the review wasn't dug into deeply enough.

[[Category:Customer Success Manager]]
[[Category:Customer Engineering]]

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BrettFullmer: Publish The Postmortem (Churn and Save Retros) page