Who Should Own the Postmortem Report After an Incident? The Incident Commander Leads the Learning

Who Owns the Postmortem Report After an Incident? A Practical Look for PagerDuty Incident Responders

When an incident shakes the system, teams gather to learn what happened and how to prevent a repeat. The postmortem (or post-incident review) is the place where intent and impact meet, turning a chaotic moment into clear, actionable lessons. A big question often comes up right at the start: who should own that report? Is it the person who caused the incident, someone on the incident command chain, or a manager who oversees the involved team? Let’s unpack the ideas, the tensions, and what tends to work best in real-world PagerDuty environments.

Let’s start with the instinct many teams have

The instinct: give ownership to the person who caused the incident

There’s a straightforward pull to let the responsible party own the post-incident write-up. After all, they’ve lived the incident from start to finish. They saw the triggers, the alerts, and the moments when the system’s safeguards either held or failed. In theory, this should produce a precise, first-hand account of what went wrong, what was learned, and what needs to change.

There’s a human appeal here. People want accountability, and a person with direct context can illuminate the subtleties that outsiders might miss—like a timing nuance in a runbook, a dependency that wasn’t obvious until the lights were already blinking, or a decision that felt right in the moment but had hidden costs. From a cultural point of view, it can feel fair to give ownership to the one who bore the consequences.

But there’s a catch that teams often feel in practice

The bias risk and the need for objectivity

When the person who triggered the incident writes the report, bias can creep in. It’s not about bad intent; it’s about perspective. The storyteller’s lens tends to highlight certain factors while downplaying others. The result can be a postmortem that reads as a personal narrative more than a learning document. And if the goal is to drive real improvement across the platform, we need a postmortem that peers from multiple angles.

That’s why many teams in the PagerDuty ecosystem emphasize a collaborative approach. The Incident Commander, who coordinates the response and has a helicopter view of what happened across teams, often helps ensure the report covers the full incident lifecycle—from alerting and escalation paths through to remediation and recovery. The person most affected by the incident contributes their insights, but not in isolation. The aim is a balanced, blameless document that surfaces root causes, not just a single perspective.

The Incident Commander’s role: coordinating, not policing

The Incident Commander is the central node in incident response. They gather facts, marshal teams, and ensure that the response follows established playbooks. When it comes to the postmortem, their strengths show up in several ways:

• They help stitch together the timeline. Incidents involve multiple teams and tools; a clear, consistent timeline is essential for understanding what happened and why.

• They bridge details and outcomes. The commander translates technical findings into actionable improvements that all teams can run with, from on-call rotation tweaks to runbook clarifications.

• They foster a blameless culture. The aim is to learn, not to pin blame. A well-facilitated postmortem keeps the focus on systems, processes, and information gaps, not personalities.

But does that mean the commander should own the report alone? Not really.

A healthier pattern: joint ownership with a clear facilitator

In many PagerDuty-focused teams, ownership is shared in a structured way:

• The person who triggered the incident provides context, logs, and direct observations. They answer the “why/how” questions from their vantage point.

• The Incident Commander coordinates the gathering of data, timelines, and cross-team inputs. They ensure the narrative makes sense to a broad audience—engineers, operators, and leadership.

• A neutral facilitator or a dedicated postmortem lead helps keep the discussion constructive, captures evidence, and drafts the document so it reads like a learning tool rather than a confession.

This blended approach helps preserve accuracy while anchoring the report in a broader, system-wide view. It also preserves accountability. When the responsible party contributes, the team gets closer to the truth. When the commander coordinates, the organization gets a dependable, learnable artifact that reduces the risk of misinterpretation.

What “ownership” should look like in practice

If you’re shaping your incident review process, here’s a practical path that draws on real-world use inside PagerDuty ecosystems and similar incident response programs:

1. Start with a neutral kickoff

• Invite the responsible person to present their perspective as a starting point, not a verdict.

• Include the Incident Commander, primary responders, and a representative from any affected team.

• Set a blameless tone: the goal is learning, not punishment.

2. Collect and corroborate data

• Gather alerts, runbooks, on-call messages, and relevant logs.

• Cross-check timelines against chat transcripts, ticket notes, and monitoring dashboards.

• Ask candid questions: what was clear, what was confusing, what would have helped.

3. Draft with a dual lens

• The responsible person shares their key observations, decisions, and perceived failure points.

• The Incident Commander provides the overarching sequence, dependencies, and cross-team impacts.

• The postmortem lead stitches these inputs into a cohesive narrative, with sections for root causes, contributing factors, and corrective actions.

4. Keep it actionable and concrete

• Translate findings into specific, testable changes: updated runbooks, improved alert thresholds, revised escalation paths, clearer ownership for components, or training needs.

• Assign owners and timelines for each action item.

5. Publish and learn

• Share the postmortem with the wider on-call and engineering teams.

• Schedule a short learning session to walk through the document, answer questions, and confirm understanding.

• Track progress on the action items and revisit the report after verification.

A few cautions worth noting

• Anonymity isn’t a cure-all. The urge to shield individuals from accountability can backfire by eroding trust. A transparent process, where accountability is coupled with learning, tends to drive better long-term outcomes.

• Balance fosters confidence. If the report leans too heavily on the perspective of a single person, it may miss systemic issues. A collaborative write-up helps surface hidden contributing factors, like gaps in runbooks, automation gaps, or misaligned on-call responsibilities.

• Cultural context matters. Some teams thrive on friction-free collaboration, while others benefit from a more process-driven approach. Adapt the weighting of ownership and facilitation to fit your organization’s culture, maturity, and risk tolerance.

Bringing the idea home with a clean example

Imagine a false alert that sparked an unplanned rollback. The on-call engineer who triggered the incident provides a first-person account: what alert came in, how the team responded, and what decision point shifted the situation toward rollback. The Incident Commander reviews the sequence, confirms the steps, and adds context about dependencies—like a downstream service that was slow to respond and a monitoring dashboard that didn’t fully reflect it. The postmortem lead drafts a shared document that highlights:

• Root cause: a missing safeguard in a deployment pipeline.

• Contributing factors: partial automation, gaps in the runbook, and a late-night on-call hand-off.

• Action items: implement a gating check in the pipeline, update the runbook, and run a disaster rehearsal with the on-call team.

What you end up with is a document that tells a story, but more importantly, yields concrete steps to reduce the chances of a repeat incident. That blend—first-person context plus a system-wide view—keeps the focus on improvement, not blame.

Why this matters for PagerDuty Incident Responders

On the PagerDuty platform, incidents are not just alarms; they’re opportunities to tighten the loop between detection, response, and learning. The ownership question isn’t about assigning a name to a file; it’s about structuring the review so that every voice is heard, the data is respected, and the path from insight to action is clear. A well-crafted postmortem does more than describe what happened. It maps out how to strengthen the entire incident response chain—alerts, runbooks, on-call rotations, and cross-team collaboration.

If you’re building or refining an incident response program, keep this simple north star in mind: the postmortem should reflect a balanced, transparent process that results in practical improvements. Whether ownership leans toward the person who caused the incident, the Incident Commander, or a collaborative blend, the end goal remains the same—learning that sticks, faster detection, and a safer system for users.

A quick takeaway you can bring to your team

• Establish a clear, blameless process for post-incident reviews.

• Start with the responsible party’s perspective, then broaden to include the Incident Commander and other stakeholders.

• Focus on concrete, testable actions with assigned owners and deadlines.

• Share the final document broadly and revisit progress, not just once, but as part of a regular cadence.

The result isn’t a single hero’s report; it’s a living document that helps your team improve, one incident at a time. And that, in the long run, is what real resilience looks like in a fast-moving tech environment.

If you’d like, I can tailor this approach to fit your team’s size, on-call structure, and the tools you use—so your post-incident reviews feel natural, practical, and genuinely useful.