The answers here are breaking down into two categories: 1. General business lessons, to which companies generally don't summarise or track them. 2. DevOps out

The answers here are breaking down into two categories: 1. General business lessons, to which companies generally don't summarise or track them. 2. DevOps outage post-mortems, which competent companies generally have some sort of process around. I've never seen a rigorous post-mortem culture in tech outside of DevOps/SRE. I guess there are a few reasons. One is probably that the DevOps/SRE space is very amenable to encoding lessons learned in scripts of various kinds, so it's actually useful to do a post-mortem exercise because the outcomes are very small, very concrete and will be somewhat actionable. Things like "errors in parsing this file shouldn't cause the server to blow up" are easily corrected and a process (unit test) put in place to formally encode that institutional knowledge. In regular software development there's way less reflection. This is partly because the tooling is much less home grown and malleable. Lessons are learned and they are encoded, but it happens slowly and through the mechanism of library and language design. It's generally not something you do within a single company but rather, it's an emergent consensus across the whole industry. Additionally, this is harder because lessons learned are often ambiguous or subjective. For instance I learned the lesson, many years ago, that dynamic typing leads to more mistakes than static typing. But you see many programmers still who prefer dynamically typed languages and dispute this sort of conclusion. In the business world there's virtually never any kind of "lessons learned" repository or process. At most you get something like a formalised interview process, but even then, those are usually baked into a company from day one or never adopted at all. I've heard of very few large companies that adopted a more rigorous approach to hiring than the one they previously used. It does happen but it's rare. At the executive/CEO level lessons learned get recorded in the form of strategy talks given at fancy conferences, if at all. Often abstracted or vague to the point of uselessness, any insight that is present gets forgotten immediately by the audience who are mostly there because it's easier than doing real work. These lessons learned are things like "innovation is key to the customer experience", which is a genuine learning in a sense (usually from observing the wreckage of firms that went up against a competent tech company). But it's not really useful in the sense of being actionable by normal employees.