Post mortems
Regardless of the qualities in the team and the product issues will occur, here are a few notes on how to handle it in the team and as a product owner.
As a product owner you will deal with the stakeholders directly affected, they are likely stressed a taking the pain of your incident. Don't expect to much sympathy and regardless of the circumstances you are responsible, apologize for any inconvenience caused and promise to do better. There might be additional requests to explain how "this could happen" or to pin point root causes. While this is important you primary focus is to avoid blame shifting to your team, as a product owner you take the blame and let the team focus on learning. Ensuring team safety and individual team member safety is paramount to build an extraordinary team.
Within the team the initial work must be to exit the state of malfunctioning and to end the incident. Once out of the immediate emergency try as early as possible to take notes of what happened and when, a way to group edit and gather this information is helpful to get as complete picture as possible. After having these notes the work to discuss and brain storm different root causes and analyse scenarios may make sense unless the chain of events is already obvious. From this point on there are multiple good guides on how to proceed and how to conduct a post mortem without putting blame on the team or its members.
Like any other activity sadly even good incident handling requires real world practice, make the most of every one, hopefully the one you are dealing with is your last chance to learn from an incident.
As a product owner you will deal with the stakeholders directly affected, they are likely stressed a taking the pain of your incident. Don't expect to much sympathy and regardless of the circumstances you are responsible, apologize for any inconvenience caused and promise to do better. There might be additional requests to explain how "this could happen" or to pin point root causes. While this is important you primary focus is to avoid blame shifting to your team, as a product owner you take the blame and let the team focus on learning. Ensuring team safety and individual team member safety is paramount to build an extraordinary team.
Within the team the initial work must be to exit the state of malfunctioning and to end the incident. Once out of the immediate emergency try as early as possible to take notes of what happened and when, a way to group edit and gather this information is helpful to get as complete picture as possible. After having these notes the work to discuss and brain storm different root causes and analyse scenarios may make sense unless the chain of events is already obvious. From this point on there are multiple good guides on how to proceed and how to conduct a post mortem without putting blame on the team or its members.
Like any other activity sadly even good incident handling requires real world practice, make the most of every one, hopefully the one you are dealing with is your last chance to learn from an incident.
Enjoy this clip from Life of Brian on the theme:
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