Incident Response Postmortem & Communication Effectiveness Survey

Welcome to the Incident Postmortem Survey. This survey takes approximately 8–10 minutes and asks about your experience during a specific recent incident. Your responses are confidential, reported only in aggregate, and will be used to improve our response and communication processes. Participation is voluntary and you may stop at any time. There are no right or wrong answers—we value your honest perspective.

What was your primary role during this incident?

• Incident commander
• Technical responder
• Communications/PR
• Customer support
• Leadership/Executive
• Stakeholder or observer

Which area was primarily impacted by this incident?

• Customer-facing systems
• Internal tools
• Data/analytics
• Infrastructure/network
• Security
• Compliance/regulatory
• Other

If applicable, what is the name or ID of the incident you are referencing?

Approximately how long did it take from detection to the start of a coordinated response?

• Under 5 minutes
• 5–15 minutes
• 16–30 minutes
• 31–60 minutes
• 1–2 hours
• More than 2 hours
• I don't know

Did the team follow a documented runbook during this incident?

• Yes, fully followed
• Partially followed
• No, deviated from runbook
• No runbook exists

Overall, how effective were the corrective actions taken during this incident?

What were the top blockers or obstacles to achieving a faster resolution?

How would you rate the timeliness of communications during the incident?

How would you rate the clarity and accuracy of communications during the incident?

How would you rate the frequency of stakeholder updates during this incident?

Rank the following communication channels from most to least effective during this incident.

1. Slack/Chat
2. Email
3. Incident tool/Timeline
4. Video bridge
5. Status page
6. Phone/SMS

How satisfied are you with the timeliness of the post-incident review?

To what extent do you agree that action items from this incident were clearly defined with accountable owners?

How confident are you that the identified actions will prevent a similar incident within the next 6 months?

Which single change would most improve incident communications next time?

• Clearer audience owners
• Preset update cadence
• Single source of truth
• Fewer channels
• More status detail
• More executive summaries
• Automated stakeholder lists
• Other (please specify)

We'd like to explore your experience a bit further. An AI moderator will ask a couple of follow-up questions about the incident response and communication. Please respond in your own words.

Based on your responses in this survey, is there anything else you'd like to share about this incident or our response process?

Which department or group are you part of?

• Engineering
• SRE/Operations
• Security
• Support
• Product/PM
• Communications/PR
• Leadership/Executive
• Other

How many years of experience do you have with incident response?

• Under 1 year
• 1–2 years
• 3–5 years
• 6–10 years
• 11+ years

Which region best describes your primary working time zone?

• Americas
• EMEA
• APAC
• Other/Multiple

Thank you for completing this survey. Your feedback directly informs our incident response improvements and will be reviewed by the postmortem team.