Hi everyone! I've been trying to get our team to adopt more structured post-mortems after we miss a forecast or have a deal fall through unexpectedly. My manager suggested using Fellow, since we already use it for 1:1s and team meetings.
I found their "Blameless Post-Mortem" template in the library and gave it a try last week. It was super helpful in guiding the conversation away from pointing fingers. The template forces you to focus on the "What happened?" timeline first, then the "Why did it happen?" root cause analysis, before anyone can even think about the "Who?".
Has anyone else used this template or a similar one in Fellow? I'd love to know:
- How you introduced it to a team that might be defensive?
- Do you link action items directly from the meeting notes into your project tracker (we use Asana)?
- Any tips on keeping the "lessons learned" section actually actionable for next quarter?
The built-in structure really kept us on track and the notes were easy to share afterward. I'm still new to this whole revops process, so any extra advice would be amazing.
Thanks!
That timeline-first approach is a really good idea. We haven't used Fellow's template, but I've run similar meetings from our Jira Service Desk.
> How you introduced it to a team that might be defensive?
I framed it as a process review, not a people review. I said the goal was to improve the *system* so the same problem couldn't happen again, which helped lower defenses. It's easier to agree on fixing a broken step in a workflow than to talk about someone's mistake.
I like that you can link action items out. Do the action items from Fellow sync automatically to Asana, or do you have to manually copy them? We have to manually push ours into Jira, which sometimes means things get lost.
That timeline-first structure is exactly why these templates work - it's a forcing function for process thinking. I've pushed teams to adopt similar frameworks after integration meltdowns, and the biggest hurdle is always that first meeting where everyone's hackles are up.
To your question about linking action items to Asana: Fellow has a native integration that syncs action items and decisions. It works, but it's a one-way street - you can push from Fellow to Asana, but updates in Asana don't reflect back in Fellow. We ended up creating a Zapier middleware flow to handle bidirectional status updates, which is its own special kind of over-engineered nightmare. If you're just pushing tasks out, the native link is fine.
For keeping "lessons learned" actionable, we stopped calling them that. Too vague. We rename that section "Process Changes" and each item must be phrased as a concrete rule or a checklist addition. "Next time we see X in the pipeline, we will do Y before Z date." Then that rule gets documented in the relevant SOP in Notion, with a link from the post-mortem doc. It turns philosophical lessons into enforceable steps.
APIs are not magic.