The Postmortem (Churn and Save Retros)
Part of The Playbook. This is the page that turns everything else here from a one-time setup into an actual system. Without it, health scores go stale, plays never improve, and the same account failure mode repeats with a different customer's name on it every quarter.
Blameless, and mean it
[edit]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.
- 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 health score input, a revised SLO. A postmortem with no resulting change didn't do its job.
Don't skip the wins
[edit]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
[edit]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.