Levchin: Effective post-mortems eliminate emotion and apologies to focus on facts
Max Levchin · Max Levchin, Founder & CEO @ Affirm:The Biggest Surprise Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Feb 5, 2025 · at 21:38
Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Affirm, discusses engineering and operational leadership. He explains how software teams should structure post-mortem reviews following technical or operational failures.
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“And the most important thing you can do about the entire process is you have to completely separate any form of apologizing, responsibility taking, you know, we should do better next time. Like, you have to be clinical about it. Like, this happened. It wasn't good. Here's why. Like, you have to give people who were feeling directly responsible for the flop, whatever the flop was, to feel very free to comment on what happened. Like, you need to encourage them to speak to the fact that they screwed up, Yet, without any sense of like, well, I need to make myself look better, or I need to create a, cast a certain light on the decisions that I made. Like, just get rid of all emotion. Exactly describe what happened.”
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