Blocker postmortem

Overview

Teams are great at reporting blockers and terrible at noticing when it’s the same blocker for the fourth time. Individually each one looks like bad luck. Lined up over a month, they look like a system that keeps producing the same problem. This preset lines them up and tells you how to break the pattern.

What this is for

This preset solves the recurring-blocker problem. Blockers get cleared one at a time, in the moment, by whoever’s closest to them, and then everyone moves on. Nobody steps back to ask whether the deploy keeps breaking for the same reason, or whether three different people got stuck waiting on the same approval. The fixes are always tactical, so the root cause never gets touched and the blocker comes back.

The Blocker postmortem preset does the stepping back. Each month it reads the last 30 days of blockers across your teams, clusters them into patterns and likely root causes, and recommends concrete preventive steps for each: a process to change, a dependency to remove, a decision to make once so it doesn’t have to be made weekly. It turns a pile of one-off interruptions into a short list of things worth fixing for good.

Who should use this

Engineering managers who keep unblocking the same kinds of things and suspect there’s a pattern they’re too close to see. You’ll get the pattern named and a way to address it at the source.

Heads of operations or delivery responsible for how smoothly work flows. You’ll have a monthly read on the friction the org keeps generating, with fixes attached.

Anyone running process improvement who wants it grounded in real friction rather than opinions. You’ll target the blockers that actually recur, not the ones that are merely annoying.

The prompt

Review all blockers reported across teams over the last 30 days. Group them into recurring patterns or root causes, and for each pattern recommend specific steps I could take to prevent it from happening again.

How to use

Click here to create a new Echo using this preset. You'll be able to customize the prompt and schedule before it starts generating answers.