How do we do this if we’re stuck in annual planning and quarterly roadmaps?

Carve out a fixed reliability/modernization capacity (even 10–15%) that is not re-traded weekly. Use the monthly modernization council to make roadmap tradeoffs explicit: “we’re shipping X, and accepting risk Y.” If your planning cycle is annual, your feedback loop still needs to be weekly—just constrain what can change.

Won’t this turn into a blame game?

Not if you separate accountability from blame. Accountability is: one owner, one measurable outcome, one due date, and leadership-protected capacity. Blame is personalizing failure. Keep incident reviews evidence-based, and push prioritization decisions into the open so they aren’t litigated in postmortems.

What if we have hundreds of services and inconsistent incident quality?

Start with your tier-0 and tier-1 services (the ones tied to revenue or safety). Standardize the incident fields for those first, and build the loop there. Once the rituals and templates work, expand. Trying to boil the ocean across 400 services is how these programs die.

How do we handle AI-generated code and “vibe coding” incidents?

Treat them like any other failure mode: tag the incident class (e.g., “missing tests,” “unsafe data migration,” “hallucinated API usage”), then create modernization epics that reduce recurrence: add contract tests, schema checks, static analysis, and deploy guards. The key is to turn “AI wrote weird code” into concrete controls and refactoring work with measurable outcomes.

Culture · Jan 6, 2026 · 8 minute read

Your Postmortems Aren’t Broken—Your Backlog Is: Turning Incidents into a Modernization Queue That Actually Ships

A repeatable feedback loop that links incident reviews to prioritized modernization work—without turning engineering into a meeting factory.

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Your Postmortems Aren’t Broken—Your Backlog Is: Turning Incidents into a Modernization Queue That Actually Ships

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist