Most failed projects get one of two postmortems: too much or too little. The too-much version turns the failure into a narrative — a blog post, a retrospective thread, an extended personal reckoning that may be emotionally necessary but that rarely produces the specific, operational insights that would actually change future behavior. The too-little version suppresses the failure entirely, pivoting quickly toward the next thing to avoid the discomfort of analysis, and forfeits all the information the failure contained. The useful version is neither. It is short, specific, and deliberately unsentimental.