<!-- PM-Skills | https://github.com/product-on-purpose/pm-skills | Apache 2.0 -->

Lessons Log

A lessons log entry captures significant learning from projects, incidents, or experiences in a format that's useful to future teams who weren't there. Unlike retrospectives (which focus on team improvement), lessons logs focus on organizational knowledge that transcends individual teams.patterns, anti-patterns, and hard-won wisdom.

When to Use

• After completing a significant project or initiative
• Following a major incident, outage, or failure
• When you realize something important that others should know
• After discovering a pattern that keeps recurring
• When experienced team members leave (capture their knowledge)
• During post-mortems to preserve learnings

When NOT to Use

• You are facilitating the team ceremony itself -> use iterate-retrospective; this skill banks the durable entry that outlives it
• You are deciding whether to change direction based on results -> use iterate-pivot-decision
• The learning is an experiment readout -> use measure-experiment-results first, then bank the transferable lesson here
• You are updating stakeholders on what was learned -> use foundation-stakeholder-update

Instructions

When asked to create a lessons log entry, follow these steps:

1. Choose a Descriptive Title Write a title that someone searching for this topic would find. Include keywords that describe the situation and the learning. Avoid generic titles like "Project X lessons."

2. Provide Context Explain the situation fully enough that someone who wasn't there can understand it. Include the project, timeline, team, and any relevant constraints. Future readers need this context to assess applicability.

3. Describe What Happened Write a factual account of what occurred. Be specific about actions taken, decisions made, and outcomes observed. Avoid blame.focus on events and systems.