Failure is inevitable. As engineers building and maintaining complex systems, we likely encounter failure in some form on a daily basis. Not every failure requires a postmortem, but if a failure impacts the bottom line of the business, it becomes important to follow a postmortem process. I say “follow a postmortem process” instead of “do a postmortem”, because a postmortem should have very specific goals designed to prevent future failures in your environment. Simply asking the five whys to try and determine the root cause is not enough.