Kill It with Fire

Postmortems establish a record about what really happened and how specific actions affected the outcome. They do not document failure; they provide context. Postmortems on success should serve a similar purpose. Why was a specific approach or technique successful? Did the final strategy look like what the team had planned at the start? Your timeline in a postmortem for success should be built around these questions: How did the organization execute on the original strategy, how did the strategy change, when did those changes happen, and what triggered them? Even the biggest successes have challenges that could have gone better and places where good fortune saved the day. Documenting those helps people evaluate the suitability of your approach for their own problems and ultimately reproduce your success.