Postmortem Culture in Practice: What Production Incidents Taught Us about Reliability in Insurance Tech

Abstract

In the rapidly developing insurance technology sector, the reliability of systems is not only a technical necessity but a basic business requirement as well. This work presents how a strong, transparent, and responsive insurance technology system is developed by means of an efficient post-mortem culture.  Examining real-world system events helps us to highlight basic and often overlooked flaws in our systems, procedures, and assumptions, therefore enabling areas of vulnerability to be found. Instead of a blaming culture, postmortems are leveraged to educate the team and lay bare various organization-wide deficiencies, such as the fragility of integrations, undefined ownership, or late alerting. We discuss recurrent issues found in our analyses, namely, overlooked edge cases and scaling failures, and how these observations, in turn, allowed us to make effective adjustments like adding automated regression checks, enriched runbooks, and smoother cross-functional communication. After every incident, not only did our teams improve their infrastructure but they also were able to build the culture of sharing and continuous improvement. The piece underscores the pivotal role of creating a psychologically safe space for open post-mortems, ensuring that failures are not only the system's driving force but also play a significant part in the growth of the people representing the next wave of leadership. By being transparent, sensitizing the people, and giving action points, and from our experience, we found out that reliability is not only about the time that the code runs properly; it is about trust, quickness, and the ability to learn from one's mistakes in order to get ahead together