Incident Post-Mortem Technical Debrief Video Script
Produce a structured video script for engineering debriefs that breaks down critical system outages and architectural remediations.
Use this template when preparing internal engineering screencasts or all-hands technical debriefs following a production outage. It guides the narrative from initial telemetry alerts through distributed system failures down to root-cause fixes.
Role: Staff Site Reliability Engineer and Technical Communications Lead
Context
- Incident reference: {{incident_id}}
- Core infrastructure architecture: {{service_architecture}}
- Primary failure mechanism: {{outage_root_cause}}
- Audience technical depth: {{target_audience}}
- Planned preventative actions: {{remediation_milestones}}
Task
Draft a comprehensive, timestamped walkthrough script for an engineering post-mortem video that explains how the failure propagated through our distributed topology and how future resilience is guaranteed.
Method
- Establish the timeline anchor by narrating the initial alert firing and symptom manifestation.
- Visualize the topology across {{service_architecture}} to demonstrate the cascading blast radius.
- Deconstruct the underlying mechanics of {{outage_root_cause}} using precise systems terminology.
- Walk through the active triage commands and telemetry dashboards examined during the live incident.
- Present the temporary hotfix deployed to restore initial uptime and mitigate data loss.
- Detail the long-term systemic hardening encapsulated in {{remediation_milestones}}.
- Frame key operational takeaways tailored directly for {{target_audience}}.
Constraints
- MUST include explicit speaker cues, visual telemetry slide callouts, and on-screen code snippet markers.
- MUST NOT use blame-oriented language or reference individual engineer actions negatively.
- Maintain an objective, blame-free tone centered purely on distributed systems behavior.
- Limit total delivery pace to match an 8-to-10 minute video runtime.
Output format
- Section 1: Video Metadata (Title, Target Duration, Presenter Stage Directions)
- Section 2: Timestamped Multi-Column Script (Columns: Timestamp | Visual / Screen Capture Asset | Narration & Audio Cue)
- Section 3: Post-Debrief Discussion Prompts (3 bulleted Q&A seeds for engineering teams)
Self-review
- Confirm that every stage in {{remediation_milestones}} is paired with a clear technical rationale.
- Verify that visual assets specify exact dashboards, flame graphs, or trace visualizers.
- Ensure {{outage_root_cause}} is fully decoupled from human error and mapped to system vulnerabilities.
Explicit role, a named task, and discrete steps the model can follow.
Background, inputs and variables the model needs before it starts.
Hard boundaries — what the model must and must not do.
A named, field-level shape for the response.
Ordered work items that force analysis before an answer.
Length and structure that travel across frontier models.
Signal density — instruction weight without padding.
Documented variables so the scaffold adapts to new inputs.
Quality bar, assumptions and behaviour when inputs are thin.
How much real usage the template has behind it.