The proposal post-mortem template: preview
A Wednesday teaser for next week's pillar. The fields that matter in a post-mortem template, and the one section most teams skip.
Next Thursday I’m publishing a long piece on proposal post-mortems — the discipline, the template, the follow-through. This is the Wednesday teaser. I’m previewing three of the template’s sections and one thing I got wrong the first few years I ran these.
The full template and the full argument land on the 26th.
Why post-mortems fail before they start
Most proposal post-mortems fail because they’re organized as a venting session. The team lost, people are frustrated, a 30-minute Zoom gets scheduled, complaints get aired, nothing changes. Leulu’s writing on this is the most honest diagnosis I’ve read: “the debrief ends, the document is published, people move on.” The next bid doesn’t inherit anything from the last bid.
A template fixes part of this. Not all of it — the follow-through is a separate discipline — but the template is what turns the call from a vent into a record that the next bid’s capture plan can actually read.
The three sections worth previewing
Section 1 — Bid summary (tight, factual). What was the opportunity, what did we propose, what were the commercials, what was the disposition. No interpretation yet. Just the facts a reader six months from now will need to understand what this record is about. Three paragraphs, maximum.
Section 2 — What the win themes did. This is the section most teams skip. For each win theme committed to in the capture plan, a one-line verdict: was it used consistently in the draft, was it visible in the executive summary, did it show up in the debrief (if one happened), is there any evidence it moved the score. Three possible verdicts: promote (reuse on similar pursuits), retire (delete from the theme library), rewrite (the kernel is right but the phrasing isn’t landing). Without this section, the theme library accretes into a junk drawer. With it, the library gets pruned and promoted in a way that the next capture plan can draw on. See the win themes field guide for the structure the themes themselves should follow.
Section 3 — KB block call-outs. Which content blocks ended up in the response, which ones needed heavy editing, which ones didn’t exist and had to be written from scratch. Three tags per block: load-bearing and good (use again without changes), load-bearing but stale (add to the rewrite queue), missing entirely (add to the KB-gap queue with an owner and a due date).
The section I’ll argue hardest for
There’s a fourth section in the full template that I’ll spend the most time on next week: three follow-up tickets with named owners and dates. Not five, not ten — three. Post-mortems with twelve action items produce zero action items. Post-mortems with three action items produce, in my experience, about two of them actually shipping.
The argument for three: a post-mortem is not the place to fix everything the proposal function is getting wrong. It’s the place to name the three changes that this specific bid taught us we need. If a single bid reveals twelve things to fix, you didn’t need a post-mortem — you needed to stop and do a quarterly review.
The thing I got wrong
For my first few years running post-mortems, I treated wins and losses asymmetrically. Losses got a full post-mortem; wins got a quick “nice work, team.” That was wrong. Wins are the richest source of compounding intelligence — you know which themes and blocks were associated with the decision to select you, which ones the buyer named in the debrief, which ones the evaluation panel praised. A win without a post-mortem is a win you can’t replicate.
Now every terminal disposition gets the same template. Won, lost, withdrawn, no-decision. The four dispositions fill the template differently — but they all fill it.
What’s coming
The full post on the 26th covers:
- The complete template, copy-pasteable.
- How to request a debrief from the buyer (with sample email language).
- The three follow-through patterns that actually work, and why weekly review rituals fail without a specific shape.
- What software has to do to make this discipline sustainable, beyond the win/loss pair capture we already shipped.
See you Thursday.