Postmortems are one of the most underused learning tools in product development. Borrowed from engineering, where they exist to prevent catastrophic bugs, they have a direct application in UX and product work. Most teams either skip them entirely or run them so badly the effort is wasted.
A postmortem is a structured analysis of a completed project. It examines what happened, why it happened, and what systemic changes follow from that. The key word is systemic. This is not a feelings debrief. It is a diagnostic process applied to both failures and successes.
The Nielsen Norman Group piece goes beyond the definition. It gets into why adaptation from engineering to UX context matters, and where teams go wrong in execution. If your team has ever finished a project and moved on without a structured review, this is the piece that explains what that cost you.
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