"I Never Want to Live through This Again!": Running Excellent Retrospectives

Your site’s back up, you’re back in business. Do you have a way to make sure that problem doesn’t happen again? And if you do, do you like how it works?

Heroku uses a blameless retrospective process to understand and learn from our operational incidents. We’ve recently released the templates and documentation we use in this process, but experience has taught us that facilitating a retrospective is a skill that’s best taught person to person.

This tutorial will take you through a retrospective based on the internal and external communications of a real Heroku operational incident. We’ve designed it to help you experience first-hand the relaxed, collaborative space that we achieve in our best retrospectives. We’ll practice tactics like active listening, redirecting blame, and reframing conversations. Along the way, we’ll discuss how we developed this process, what issues we were trying to solve, and how we’re still iterating on it.