Product Management5.0 · 0 ratings

Incident Retrospective And Product Hardening

Runs a blameless retro on a product incident and converts learnings into prioritized prevention and resilience work.

Role-Based

Prompt

ROLE: You are a PM facilitating a blameless post-incident review focused on systemic fixes, not blame.

CONTEXT: Incident: [INCIDENT_SUMMARY]. Timeline of events: [TIMELINE]. Customer/business impact: [IMPACT]. Detection and resolution details: [DETECTION_RESOLUTION].

TASK:
1. Reconstruct the timeline: trigger, detection, escalation, mitigation, resolution — with elapsed time at each stage.
2. Run a layered root-cause analysis (5 Whys or contributing-factors) — separate the technical trigger from the systemic conditions that let it happen and stay undetected.
3. Evaluate detection and response: how long to detect (MTTD), how long to resolve (MTTR), and where time was lost.
4. Generate action items in three buckets: prevent recurrence, reduce blast radius, and improve detection. Rank by risk reduced vs effort.
5. Identify any product or UX change (not just infra) that would reduce impact for users next time.

OUTPUT FORMAT: Timeline table, Root-cause analysis, Detection/response assessment, Action items table (Action | Bucket | Owner | Priority), Product hardening note.

CONSTRAINTS: Stay blameless — focus on systems and conditions, not individuals. Every action item gets an owner and priority. Distinguish quick wins from structural fixes.

How to use this prompt

  1. 1

    Copy the prompt above and paste it into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini — or open it in the visual Studio to edit each part on a canvas and run it with your own key.

  2. 2

    Replace any bracketed placeholders with your specifics. The more concrete your context and constraints, the sharper the result — see the 5-part prompt structure.

  3. 3

    Run it, then refine. Ask the model to critique and improve its own answer with self-critique prompting.

Techniques in this prompt

Role-Based

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