How Etsy’s Architecture Reviews and No‑Blame Postmortems Boost Engineering Efficiency

Architecture Review

When engineers need a new architecture, they document design rationale, goals, trade‑offs, and alternatives, then present the proposal to an architecture review meeting. A typical session includes a 10‑minute presentation followed by 50 minutes of Q&A, ensuring the design is evaluated by the whole engineering organization.

Reduce New‑Technology Overhead

The process aims to adopt the most convenient, well‑known solutions and avoid wholesale technology replacements unless no viable alternatives exist.

Decrease Self‑Centered Attitudes

Like code review, architecture review is collaborative, shifting design decisions from individuals to larger teams, producing solutions that serve buyer and seller needs rather than personal preferences.

Increase Perspectives

Inviting all engineers to participate encourages diverse viewpoints, helping new project teams break out of entrenched thinking.

Raise Awareness

Architecture review ensures every engineer understands how different stack components work and why decisions are made.

No‑Blame Postmortem

After any incident that negatively impacts the site, product, or schedule, all employees are invited to a postmortem led by a trained facilitator. A clear action timeline is set, participants explain their understanding of the root cause, and the team discusses how to improve tools or processes to prevent recurrence.

Reduce Fear

The “no‑blame” stance helps staff stay confident, focusing on learning from mistakes rather than assigning fault.

Prevent Repeated Incidents

By openly analyzing downtime causes, the team identifies improvements that lower the chance of similar failures.

Improve Learning

Open discussions about incident timelines and remediation raise collective knowledge and proactive risk handling.

Etsy’s Engineering Principles

The four key practices are code review, continuous deployment, architecture review, and no‑blame postmortem. From these arise four principles: empowerment & trust, collective responsibility, continuous learning, and mutual accountability, which together reduce fear of unknown technologies and increase productivity.