Turning Incidents into Insights, Not Insults

Let’s face it—most incident retrospectives are about as useful as debug logs without timestamps. They’re full of finger-pointing, hindsight bias, and theoretical scenarios where everyone acts with perfect foresight. It’s time to change the script. In this talk, we’ll explore a blame-aware, human-centered approach to incident management, where every incident becomes an opportunity for meaningful growth, not just a checkbox on the postmortem list.

Instead of “who dropped the ball?” this approach asks, “what did we learn, and how can we make things better?” By focusing on quality observability, a useful service catalog, and leveraging a strong customer support team as our first line of defense, we’ll transform incident management from a reactive cycle into a proactive practice. We’ll dive into designing retrospectives that generate actionable insights without the usual counterfactual time-traveling (“If only we had…”) and that bring genuine improvements rather than finger-pointing.  We’ll look at ways to identify commonality between incidents to identify systemic issues instead of just classing everything as ‘code bug’.

With quality observability, we’ll demonstrate how teams can identify and resolve issues before they become five-alarm fires, using metrics that actually matter. We’ll discuss how to build a service catalog that doesn’t make you wish for the simpler days of “Ctrl+F,” helping everyone—DevOps, engineering, and support—stay aligned and informed. Finally, we’ll look at how to integrate customer support as a critical part of incident management. Far from being an afterthought, support teams offer front-line visibility into issues as they’re happening, making them invaluable partners for incident management and retrospectives.

Attendees will walk away equipped with practical strategies to build an incident management culture that emphasizes continuous learning and real improvements. By the end of the session, you’ll be ready to lead retros that focus on insights over blame, avoid the “Groundhog Day” of recurring incidents, and leverage every incident as a chance to build stronger systems and stronger teams. Regardless of your role, this session will show you how to turn retrospectives into a powerful tool for continuous improvement and resilience.