Improving Postmortems from Chores to Masterclass with Paul Osman

Paul Osman: I lead the SRE team at Under Armour. Who here knows about Under Armour as a tech company? Does anybody think about Under Armour as a tech company? Under Armour makes athletic attire, shirts and shoes. We are also the company that owns MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal and Endomondo, which are all fitness trackers that our customers use to either keep track of nutrition goals or fitness goals. That's Under Armour, and specifically that's actually my team. We work on the reliability of those consumer applications.

I'm going to be talking today about postmortems and the postmortem process. First, I'm going to zoom out a little bit and talk about incident analysis, which is actually a much bigger field. Incident analysis is the study of how to actually analyze what happened during events that we can learn from. I'm going to try to give some lessons that we've learned doing incident analysis.

Let's talk about postmortems. The term comes from medicine and the actual definition is an examination of a dead body to determine the cause of death. That was the first thing that came up when I Googled it. That's awful. I'm really glad that's not what I do. I have a huge amount of respect for doctors. I don't have the stomach for it, and I'm really glad that nobody tends to die when our systems go down. I'm sure there are maybe some people in this room for whom that's true, but that's certainly not true for us. 

Leave a Comment