How CTOs Use Blameless Postmortems to Build a Learning Culture

Tech Leadership with Fexingo: Engineering Managers, CTOs, and Technical Leadership Conversations · Jul 29, 2026 · 7m

In episode 137 of Tech Leadership with Fexingo, Lucas and Luna explore how CTOs leverage blameless postmortems to transform failures into learning opportunities. They trace the practice back to Etsy's 2012 outage and John Allspaw's principles, then break down the concrete rituals—from incident commanders to retrospective meetings—that make this culture work. They explain why naming a 'human error' is a stopping point, and how the five whys and system-level fixes create continuous improvement. The hosts also address common pitfalls, like when blamelessness becomes a hollow checkbox, and how to…