The post-mortem can be a fascinating look into the development of a project. I've found myself reading a lot of these looking for insights into the development process.
-But there's a subtle trap in the post-mortem: they're a recollection of events from a vantage point of a successful (or unsuccessful) project. They're from a vantage point of someone who has made a thing, and it was successful enough that you are reading about that project's ups and downs from a vantage point where the success of the project is a foregone conclusion (or the vantage point where you're
+But there's a subtle trap in the post-mortem: they're a recollection of events from a vantage point of a successful (or unsuccessful) project. They're from a vantage point of someone who has made a thing, and it was successful enough that you are reading about that project's ups and downs. They're written from a vantage point where the success of the project is a foregone conclusion (or the vantage point where the project is was important enough to document why it was a failure, or didn't live up to the expectations of those involved). It can give you a false-sense that what you're working on is not as important as the things that other people are working on. But we don't know the importance of our project in real-time. It may never see the light of day or it might be something that changes the world. We can't know that while we're working on it (though we can have a sense of whether or not we _feel_ our work is important or not).
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+There's also the tendency in post-mortems to have a bit of hindsight about them. Things that were clear and definite in the moment might not make as much sense with the benefit of future-understanding. There's also selective memory where something might not be remembered with as much clarity when looking at it from the vantage point of a completed (or failed) project. Statements like "we knew this wouldn't have worked" from the vantage point of hindsight may have been "we wanted to try to see if this would not work. We were convinced it wouldn't work but we tried anyhow". Consider anyone writing about their past as an unreliable narrator. True, they may be the most experienced and knowledgeable narrator we have, but they are generally not an outside perspective on whatever they were creating.
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+There's nothing wrong with reading a post-mortem about a project - we can learn a great deal about how a project is run (or shouldn't be run) and what pitfalls may befall us if we go down a similar path. But understand that you're reading one account (whether by one person or one team of people). They have the vantage point of someone deep in the conflict. You're looking at their recollections of tactics, not the overall strategy brought them to the place.
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