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This guide walks a post-mortem from the draft scaling.cloud creates on resolution through to a published retrospective. For how post-mortems work conceptually — the lifecycle, sections, and AI behavior — see Post-mortems.

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Prerequisites

  • A resolved incident. Resolving an incident creates its post-mortem draft automatically.
  • Permission to edit the post-mortem (the author and organization admins can edit).
1

Open the draft

In the dashboard, go to Post-mortems. The draft for your incident is at the top — filter by Draft or Mine only if the list is long. Open it.The sidebar shows the incident at a glance: severity, when it opened and resolved, duration, affected components, and who was paged.
2

Review what's already filled in

If your organization has AI Investigations, the Timeline, Root cause, and Contributing factors sections are already seeded from the incident’s findings. Read them first and correct anything the signals got wrong — they’re a starting draft, not the final word.
3

Write the remaining sections

Fill in the rest: Summary, Impact, What went well, Learnings, and Follow-ups. Capture concrete, owned action items in Follow-ups — that’s the part that prevents a recurrence.There’s no save button — changes auto-save when you blur a section or pause typing.
4

Address the AI review

scaling.cloud’s AI review leaves comments on the draft, flagging thin sections, a vague root cause, or missing follow-ups. Work through them and tighten the document. The review only comments — it never edits your text, so you stay in control.
5

Request review

Click Request review and optionally pick a teammate as the reviewer — they’re notified. This moves the post-mortem to In review. Reviewers read and comment; you keep editing until it’s ready.
6

Publish

When it’s final, click Publish. (If you don’t need a reviewer, use Publish without review to go straight from draft to published.) A published post-mortem is locked and read-only.

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After publishing

  • Reopen — need to fix something? Click Reopen for edits to unlock the document, then publish again.
  • Export — from the Post-mortems list, download any post-mortem as Markdown or PDF to share it outside scaling.cloud.
  • Follow-ups — open action items stay visible on the list after publishing, so the work doesn’t get lost.
Drafts that sit unwritten are flagged overdue, and scaling.cloud reminds the author. Filter the list by Overdue only to clear the backlog.

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Troubleshooting