Product Update: Upgrade to Exporting your Retrospectives

Blameless is excited to announce an enhancement to our Incident Retrospective tool! The Export feature now allows for customizable retrospectives. In this blog post, we’ll share:

• Why this helps our users
• What the new capabilities look like
• How you can start using them today

Sharing learnings just got easier

After an incident, you’ll have lots of people looking for answers. Your team, your leadership, and other business stakeholders will all want to know what happened and how you’ll work to improve your reliability in the future.

Your team will answer these questions with a detailed incident retrospective. Retrospectives allow teams to blamelessly analyze what happened during an incident, curate the incident timeline with additional context, determine impact, write their accounts of the incident, and decide the appropriate action items moving forward.

It’s important to provide key information about the incident to other stakeholders, and to do so with as little additional toil on the team as possible. This can be done with Blameless’ modular incident retrospective email capability.

Customize your retrospectives

Not every email will look the same. The email you send your CTO may need to be different than the one you send to Legal. The email you send the Executive team may need to be different from the one you send to the Engineering organization.

Previously, the flexibility to pick and choose the relevant information to send to different stakeholders was more limited. Now, with Blameless’ new email capabilities, users can select each section that they want to attach and reorder them in the way they see fit. This makes the retrospective more relevant to different stakeholders and focuses on what each stakeholder may care most about. 

Additionally, we have improved the look and feel of the retrospective. When you export as PDF or email, the information you select is presented to you in a new design template that makes the retrospective easier to consume. 

This also gives it a more sleek appearance. Sections that users can add include the summary, impact, timeline, follow-up actions, analysis, contributing factors, custom questions, and more.

Retrospectives for all audiences

Below are some examples of how you might use this new modular design to convey the right information to the right people.

Executives: For these emails, consider beginning with the high-level summary in as few words as possible. Your CxOs will first want to know what happened. Afterward, add the customer impact. This tells the audience what effect the incident had on the customers. Add action items at the bottom of this email. While some of the technical details might be too in-depth for a person without an engineering background, it will still reassure leaders that there is a path forward after the incident.

Legal: These emails should be short and to the point. Mostly, what Legal cares about is whether any SLA or other violations occurred. The team will want customer impact first, and a high-level summary afterward.

Engineering: These retrospectives should go out in their entirety. While not all the information disclosed in the retrospective will pertain to all teams, much of the information is valuable for learning purposes. Plus, creating a culture of reading and sharing incident retrospectives is important. It helps everyone grow.

If you want to try Blameless’ new Retrospective Export capabilities, you can try us out today. Or, sign up for a personalized demo with our team here to see how this is part of a larger SRE solution.