# Business Incident Postmortem Template

Use for operational incidents: missed launches, customer escalations, failed campaigns, delivery delays, outages, process breakdowns, or internal mistakes.

## Incident Summary

Incident title:
Date/time:
Owner:
Severity: Low / Medium / High / Critical
Status: Open / Resolved / Monitoring

## What Happened?

Describe the incident in plain language.

## Impact

| Area | Impact | Evidence | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customers | | | |
| Revenue | | | |
| Team | | | |
| Product / delivery | | | |
| Reputation | | | |

## Timeline

| Time | Event | Owner / source |
|---|---|---|
| | | |

## Root Cause Analysis

Immediate cause:

Contributing factors:
1.
2.
3.

What made detection slower?

What made resolution slower?

## What Worked

- 
- 
- 

## What Did Not Work

- 
- 
- 

## Corrective Actions

| Action | Type | Owner | Due | Success criteria |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| | Prevent / Detect / Respond | | | |

## Communication

Who needs to know?

- Customers:
- Team:
- Partners:
- Advisors/investors:

Message draft:

```text
We experienced [issue]. The impact was [impact]. We have resolved / are resolving it by [actions]. We will prevent recurrence by [changes].
```

## Review Date

Follow-up review:

## AI Prompt

```text
Review this postmortem. Identify vague root causes, weak corrective actions, and missing owners. Keep the tone blameless and operational.
```