--- title: "How to Run an Agency Postmortem (Without Losing Your Team)" description: "The four-column postmortem framework, plus the behavior rules that decide whether you learn anything or just make your team defensive. For agency owners who want fixes that stick." url: https://timkilroy.com/blog/agency-postmortem-rules date: 2026-06-05 updated: 2026-06-13T16:51:01Z category: "Leadership" author: Tim Kilroy --- # How to Run an Agency Postmortem (Without Losing Your Team) _The four-column postmortem framework, plus the behavior rules that decide whether you learn anything or just make your team defensive. For agency owners who want fixes that stick._ The project's over. Maybe it went great. Maybe it went sideways and you're staring at the wreckage wondering what the hell happened. Either way, this is the moment for a postmortem — and how you run it determines whether you actually learn anything or just make everyone defensive. First rule, and it's non-negotiable: you do not do this alone. *Even when you think you can, you can't.* ## The 4 Column Structure A postmortem isn't a vibe session. It's a structured look at what drove the result. Start with the outcome and work backward. **What were the results?** Good, bad, what you expected, or a surprise? Name it honestly. **Which elements drove those results?** What actually moved the needle…for you or against you? Then take every element and sort it into two buckets: - **What worked.** The things that went well. - **What sucked.** The things that didn't. And here's the column that makes the whole exercise worth doing: - **What are we going to change?** Everything from the first two buckets feeds into this one. For "what worked," you're asking: what do we lock down and amplify? For "what sucked," you're asking: what do we kill or avoid next time? Underneath both, look for the *controllable* elements — the things that were actually in your power, not the weather and the economy. There's one more question, and it's the subtle one: at what point should we have course-corrected or doubled down? Somewhere in the middle of the project there was a moment where you could have seen it coming — "this isn't working, change it" or "this is working, do more of it." Finding that moment is how you get faster at reading the next project in real time. ## The Rules That Keep It From Blowing Up Here's where most agency owners destroy the value of their own postmortems. The structure is easy. The behavior is hard. **You are a participant, not the leader.** Even if you ran the project. Even if you were the only person on it. When you sit down to debrief, you're on the committee — not chairing it. **Your opinion is not worth more than anyone else's.** Your insider perspective and your years of experience — in this room, they don't carry extra weight. The moment your take outranks everyone else's by default, people stop telling you the truth. **Shut up more than you talk.** If you're in a leadership position, you should be doing far more listening than talking. Your team is telling you what happened. You are not telling them. **Do not get defensive.** If the postmortem turns up something that reflects badly on a decision you made, and you get defensive about it — congratulations, you just lost your team. They will see you differently, and they'll never be straight with you again. The defensiveness costs you far more than the mistake ever did. **Tim's Take:** The hardest part of a postmortem isn't the analysis. It's keeping your mouth shut and your ego in check while people tell you things you don't want to hear. If you can do that, your team will hand you the truth every time. If you can't, you'll get a polite, useless version of events and wonder why nothing ever improves. ## When to Run a Postmortem Run a postmortem after every significant change in your agency — a new service launch, a major client engagement, a big internal shift. And schedule them for the things you do regularly, too. Do a postmortem after every client onboarding. After every sales process. These are the high-frequency projects where small improvements compound the fastest, precisely because you run them so often. ## From Postmortem to ACTUAL Change Here's the trap: you run a great postmortem, you fill the "what are we going to change" column with good ideas — and then nothing changes, because no one actually owns the fix. The list becomes a graveyard of good intentions. That list is your get-it-done machine, but only if every item on it has an owner. That's what the [RACI framework](https://timkilroy.com/blog/raci-matrix-for-agencies) is for — turning "we should change this" into "this person owns this change, and here's the authority to make it." Without it, your postmortem is just a feelings circle with extra steps. ## Next Steps - Take Action Put a 30-minute postmortem on the calendar after your next finished project — and a recurring one after your next client onboarding. Use the four columns. And the entire time, practice the hardest skill: listening more than you talk. If you want to see which of your repeatable processes are leaking the most value — the ones most worth a standing postmortem — and you want help building the management habits to fix them, that's the work we do inside [Agency Studio](https://timkilroy.com/agency-studio). --- Canonical URL: https://timkilroy.com/blog/agency-postmortem-rules