A hard-earned rule from incident retrospectives:

LinkedIn Draft — Workflow (2026-04-07) A hard-earned rule from incident retrospectives: Incident RCA without a data-backed timeline is just a story you told yourself Most post-mortems produce lessons that don't stick. The root cause is almost always the same: the timeline was built from memory, not from data. Memory-based timeline: Data-backed timeline: T+0 "Deploy happened" T+0:00 Deploy (Argo event) T+? "Errors started" T+0:07 Error rate +0.3% (Prometheus) T+? "Someone noticed" T+0:12 P95 latency 340ms→2.1s (trace) T+? "We rolled back" T+0:19 Alert fired (PD) T+0:31 Rollback complete (Argo) Where it breaks: ▸ Log timestamps across services diverge by seconds without NTP — your timeline is wrong before you begin. ▸ Correlation between a deploy event and a metric spike gets missed when dashboards lack deployment markers. ▸ Contributing factors vanish from the narrative because they're hard to prove — and the same incident repeats. The rule I keep coming back to: → Build the timeline fr