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Write a customer postmortem with a computed duration
- For Customer support teams
- You practice Keeping the AI to your sources
- Time about 5 minutes
- Level Advanced
About this exercise
Write a customer-facing postmortem as exactly four lines starting "Impact:", "Cause:", "Fix:" and "Prevention:". Impact gives the duration from start to full resolution, worked out from the timeline. Use only confirmed facts and no staff names. Plain text, under 100 words.
Common mistakes when you ask AI for this
- Adding the guess. The engineer's bad-deploy idea sounds plausible. Try: Say: "Confirmed facts only."
- Wrong duration. The AI times from detection at 2:20 PM. Try: Say: "Duration: first delay at 2:05 PM to resolved 4:00 PM."
- Naming staff or wrong layout. The AI names the on-call engineer and writes paragraphs. Try: Say: "No staff names; four labeled lines."
- Getting markdown back. AI adds bold and headings by default, which show up as stray symbols where this is pasted. Try: Say "plain text, no bold, no headings, no asterisks".
- Trusting the AI to count words. AI is bad at counting and usually runs long, so a vague "keep it short" lands well over the limit. Try: Cap each part instead of the total, for example "each line under 15 words".
What a strong prompt includes
- Asks for plain text
- Sets a length limit
- Names the labels
- Limits to confirmed facts
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