The Engineering Incident Retro That Builds Trust

Incidents surface the invisible design decisions inside your stack. Capture them while the context is still warm.

Before the retro

• Share a two-minute Loom outlining the incident timeline.
• Document customer impact as a narrative, not a chart.
• List every quick fix already in flight so the meeting stays strategic.

During the retro

1. Story replay (5 minutes). Let the incident owner narrate what happened, what they felt, and where they had to improvise.
2. Signal mapping (12 minutes). Map detection signals to the system components. Highlight where observability failed first.
3. Design the guardrail (10 minutes). Choose one architectural, one process, and one culture guardrail to implement.

After the retro

• Publish the guardrails in your engineering handbook.
• Pair with product on the customer comms follow-up.
• Schedule a verification drill to test the new guardrails inside two weeks.

Reliability is a team sport. When engineering shares the learning loop, everyone in the company understands how to protect uptime.