Runbooks and post-mortems
Lesson 2 of 3 in Technical Writing — RFCs, Design Docs & Runbooks · 14 minutes
Operational documents that work under pressure — runbooks for on-call and post-mortems that drive learning rather than blame.
What you'll learn
- Write runbooks usable under incident pressure
- Structure post-mortems blamelessly
- Convert incidents into durable team learning
From the lesson
Runbooks and post-mortems are the operational writing that keeps Canadian tech organizations functioning. The engineer paged at 3 AM doesn't have time to read a thoughtful design doc — they need a runbook that works under stress. The team recovering from a bad outage needs a post-mortem that leads to learning, not a blame document that hides the truth. The patterns below are what high-performing Canadian tech organizations actually use.
**Runbooks — operational docs that work under pressure**
A runbook is a step-by-step guide for handling a specific operational scenario: deploying a service, rotating credentials, recovering from a specific failure mode. The on-call engineer running a runbook…