The Comms Post-Mortem: A blueprint for future success
Your launch or event is in the books, but the job isn’t quite done yet.
TL;DR: Most comms teams treat a product launch or crisis response like a sprint to the finish line. But the real wins—and the biggest avoidable disasters—show up after the fact.
A post-mortem isn’t a blame session. It’s your insurance policy against repeating the same mistakes:
Silence lets the internet write your story (Astronomer).
Sidestepping fuels the backlash (American Eagle).
Delays erode trust—even if you own the failure (CS Energy).
The faster you diagnose what went wrong and share the lessons learned, the faster you stop your next white whale before it breaches.
A version of this column first ran on the popular Spin Sucks blog in 2023 and can be found here.
Communications teams pour hours—sometimes months—into a big launch or announcement:
Vetting talking points
Creating collateral
Prepping customer-facing teams
Lining up media, analysts, and influencers
And then… a single “white whale” surfaces and sinks the whole plan.
If you’ve been in this game long enough, you have your own Captain Ahab moment. The stakeholder who insists on dozens of nit-picky edits. The exec who dismisses a key platform because they “don’t use it personally.” The approver who vanishes for two weeks without a backup. Or the leader in love with a jargon-heavy product description that ignores the problem it solves—choosing corporate chest-pounding over customer relevance.
My White Whale (and the Glare That Went With It)
You may remember Bank of America once announced a $5 monthly debit card fee that, thankfully, would only hit a small percentage of unprofitable customers.
We had solid talking points for media and frontline reps. The news release was as good as a bad-news announcement could be. But when we pitched a simple landing page where customers could quickly check if they were subject to the fee, the most senior person in the room shot it down.
“The Internet isn’t going to be a big deal.”
I decided to die on that hill anyway. The glare I got in the meeting—and the discreet kick under the table from my boss—told me I’d pushed too far.
Competitors loved the opening. A 22-year-old launched a petition that hit 100,000 signatures in a week and 300,000 in a month. Smaller banks pounced. A month later, we killed the fee.
That experience led my boss to green-light my proposed formal communications post-mortem process. It’s one of the best tools I’ve ever had for preventing repeat disasters—and making good launches even better.
Why Post-Mortems Still Matter in 2025
Sometimes the “white whale” isn’t a botched announcement — it’s the response you don’t give.
Astronomer learned this the hard way. In July 2025, the data-pipeline company found itself trending for all the wrong reasons when its married (but not to each other) CEO and HR director were caught on a stadium Kiss Cam during a Coldplay concert… and dove to the floor to hide. The clip went viral within hours.
For nearly two days, the company said nothing. That silence left a vacuum that the internet happily filled with memes, speculation, and theories about what the moment “really” meant for the company’s culture. When Astronomer finally spoke, it was to announce a board investigation and place both executives on leave—but by then, they were reacting to the internet’s version of events, not shaping their own.
Lesson: If you can’t respond to a high-profile moment in hours—not days—you’ve lost control of the narrative before you even utter a word.
Then there’s the other kind of white whale: the response that doesn’t actually address the problem.
When American Eagle debuted its “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign in July 2025, it triggered more than denim envy—it lit up a political lightning rod. Critics argued the “genes/jeans” wordplay, paired with Sweeney’s appearance, evoked eugenics and exclusionary beauty standards. Cultural commentators, academics, and thousands of social posts amplified the critique.
For several days, American Eagle stayed silent. Then on August 1, they issued a statement:
“This campaign is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story.”
Instead of ending the conversation, the statement became part of it. Critics said it dodged the core concern and dismissed the perspectives of those raising it. The result? A second wave of backlash—not because of the ad itself, but because of how the brand addressed it.
Lesson: If you don’t address criticism directly and with empathy, your “response” risks becoming Exhibit A in the case against you.
And then there are cases where the response comes late—but at least includes ownership.
On April 4, 2025, Australia’s CS Energy experienced a significant boiler “pressure spike” at Queensland’s Callide Power Station. Two draft statements were prepared—one on the day of the incident and another the next day—but neither was released. Public officials and the community remained in the dark for days while speculation grew.
By the time CS Energy publicly acknowledged on April 14—10 days later—that they hadn’t done a good job of communicating, the damage was already done. The delay fed accusations of a cover-up, led to an executive shakeup, and forced the company to commit to real-time outage reporting in the future. Still, that admission of failure gave them a foothold to start repairing trust.
Lesson: If your comms process can’t deliver a clear, intentional message in the first 24 hours, you don’t just have a PR problem—you have a systems problem.
These three cases—silence, sidestepping, and late-but-owned—are exactly the kinds of moments where a thoughtful post-mortem could surface the process gaps, decision-making breakdowns, and cultural blind spots that made the situation worse. And in each case, sharing some version of those lessons publicly could have helped restore trust. For example, we don’t know whether Astronomer executives immediately took the “Mad Men” approach of dropping everything and calling their customers, rather than worrying about what non-customers were saying. But they could have done both.
The 5 Areas to Review in Your Post-Mortem
(Yes, you can steal this list (there are 25 questions altogether). Here’s the downloadable template.)
1. Objectives
Were they measurable?
Did they align with company and business-unit goals?
Did we clearly communicate those goals internally?
2. Partner Involvement
Who was brought in, and when?
Should they have been engaged earlier—or later?
3. Approvals & Decision-Making
Were governance teams looped in at the right time?
Did feedback and final decisions come quickly enough?
4. Messaging
Did we tailor messages for each audience?
Was the message simple, shareable, and validated with the right data?
5. Timelines
Did we launch on time?
If delayed, what was the comms impact?
And always end with: What will we do differently next time?
Tips for a Post-Mortem That Actually Works
Include Everyone – Partners outside comms, agencies, even those who were only tangentially involved. Fresh eyes catch blind spots.
Create Two Plans – A one-pager for execs (set expectations) and a detailed plan for the core team.
Schedule Early – Put the post-mortem on the calendar at the start of the project. Move it if the launch shifts.
Use a Pre-Meeting Survey – Three things that went well, three that didn’t. Anonymous tools uncover the quiet truths.
Send an Agenda in Advance – Include shout-outs for people who went above and beyond.
Assign a Moderator & Note-Taker – Or bring in a neutral facilitator if the project lead might attract criticism.
Share a Recap – Document best practices, unresolved issues, and ownership for fixes.
Two Rules to Protect the Process
No blame games – Focus on process, not personalities.
No black holes – If you surface a problem, assign someone to fix it before the next launch.
Post-mortems aren’t just a crisis-recovery tool—they’re your Communications Windex, keeping the streaks and smudges from building up until they obscure your message entirely.
