Turn a post-mortem into prevention work

From post-mortem to prevention work

Turns a post-mortem into root causes, lessons learned, and concrete prevention tasks, plus a flowchart that traces each cause to the work that stops it happening again. Instead of a doc that gets read once and forgotten, you get action items the team can own and track. Use it right after an incident review to make sure the fixes actually get done.

Produces

Root cause Lesson learned Action item

Get Tana

Post-mortem: podcast outage

Post-mortemReviewed

Mia

Impact: ~1,200 learners
Duration: 6 hours

Summary

Podcast generation was down for six hours on Saturday. Support tickets reached us before monitoring did. The chain below traces each root cause to the work that stops it recurring.

Prevention chain

MermaidPreviewSourceCopy

Single provider, no headroomAdd a fallback provider

No quota alertingAlert at 80 percent usage

From the Jul 4 incident review

Related skills

Let learners pause their streak without losing it
Feature requestPrioritizedMia
Frequency
9 of 14 interviews
Segment
Daily learners, 6+ month streaks
Product area
Streaks·Product area
Request
Learners want a way to pause their streak for a planned break (vacation, exams, illness) instead of watching it reset to zero. Losing a long streak is the single most cited reason for quitting the app entirely.
Evidence from interviews
9 of 14 interviewees raised it unprompted, the highest of any request this round
All 9 are daily learners with streaks over 6 months, our highest-retention segment
3 admitted to doing a throwaway lesson at midnight just to protect the streak
Why it ranks first
Highest frequency, and it concentrates in the segment we least want to churn. A learner who loses a 200-day streak rarely rebuilds it. Runner-up requests (offline review, speaking-only mode) came up in 5 and 4 interviews respectively.
Suggested shape
Allow 2 pause windows per year, up to 14 days each
Streak shows as frozen, not broken, while paused
Nudge to resume on the planned end date
From the Jul 3 user-research readout, 14 interviews
Turn user interviews into a ranked feature backlog
Extract, dedupe and prioritize feature requests by frequency and segment
Placement test drop-off from the Jasmine interview
Onboarding friction mapIn progressLin
Learner
Jasmine, new signup
Product area
Onboarding·Product area
Drop-off point
Placement test
What we heard
Jasmine signed up to read Arabic news and podcasts without a dictionary open. She almost quit during the placement test because it felt long and unrelated to that goal, then nearly bailed again when her first session ran past ten minutes.
Onboarding funnel
MermaidPreviewSourceCopy
Sign upPlacement test, feels too longFirst AI story, the magic momentDay-2 return
From the Jul 7 user interview
Find the top friction points across onboarding calls
See the friction points that trip up onboarding calls, ranked by how often they hit
Teachers asking for printable worksheets
JTBDValidatedLin
Requested by
Northwind Academy·Customer
Product area
Classroom·Product area
Surface ask
Three school customers asked for printable PDF worksheets of each lesson. Two framed it as a missing feature and one made it a renewal condition.
The real job
When the class period cannot run on devices, teachers still need to fill 40 minutes with Saga-aligned material so the lesson plan does not fall apart. The job is keeping class continuity, not printing.
Evidence
Northwind bans phones two days a week, so Saga is unusable half the time
A teacher at Brightwater said she rebuilds exercises by hand in a doc every Sunday
Nobody asked for answer keys or grading, only something to hand out
What this opens up
Any offline companion to the lesson satisfies the job. A projector-friendly class mode may serve it better than PDFs and keeps activity data we would lose on paper.
From the Jul 7 customer call review
Uncover the job-to-be-done behind the ask
Separate what the user asks for from the job they are actually trying to do
Product feedback: listening-first onboarding design review
Product feedbackReviewedLin
Product area
Onboarding·Product area
Reviewed by
Design team
Evidence
Screen recording, 2 clips
Summary
The review supported the listening-first onboarding direction, but the UI needs clearer scaffolding before learners start the sample. The strongest feedback centered on making progress explicit and keeping the reading card easy to scan.
Reading card: pronunciation hints need protection
The reading card stacks the sentence, the translation, and the pronunciation line. Reviewers flagged that any onboarding change must keep those three layers visually distinct, or beginners lose the pronunciation support they rely on.
Key themes
Progress needs explicit meaning: the streak ring cannot rely on visual metaphor alone
Reading-card clarity matters: sentence, translation, and pronunciation must stay distinct
Word-detail hierarchy needs focus: learning content and stats should not compete
Follow-up actions
Redesign the streak ring with an explicit metric label
Add a difficulty toggle before the listening sample
Decide how zero-vocabulary learners enter onboarding
From the Jul 8 design review
Turn a design review into typed product feedback
Walk out of a design review with structured feedback, not scattered notes

Turn a post-mortem into prevention work

Related skills

Turn user interviews into a ranked feature backlog

Find the top friction points across onboarding calls

Uncover the job-to-be-done behind the ask

Turn a design review into typed product feedback