5 Whys Root Cause Analysis
Brief
The 5 Whys Root Cause Analysis is a structured problem-solving technique where you start with a problem statement and ask "Why?" five times in sequence. Each answer becomes the subject of the next question. The goal is to move past symptoms and surface the underlying process or system failure you can actually fix.
Who Can Use It
Product and engineering teams
Operations and DevOps teams
Customer support and service teams
Project managers
Quality assurance teams
Anyone investigating recurring issues or incidents
How to Use It
Write a clear Problem Statement — what happened, when, and what was the impact.
Ask "Why did this happen?" and record the answer (Answer 1).
Ask "Why did Answer 1 happen?" and record the answer (Answer 2).
Repeat for Answers 3, 4, and 5.
Stop when you reach a cause you can address with a process or system change — this is your Root Cause.
Define Corrective Actions: assign each action an owner and a due date.
Tip: a good root cause points at a process or system, not a person. If your answer is a name, ask why once more.
Example
Problem Statement: Checkout page was down for 3 hours on 12 Aug — approx. $18,000 in lost orders and 40+ support tickets. (Investigated 13 Aug by the platform team.)
Why 1: The payment server ran out of memory and crashed.
Why 2: The payment service has a memory leak.
Why 3: The 8 Aug release does not close old database connections.
Why 4: The release was never load-tested before going live.
Why 5: The release checklist has no performance testing step.
Root Cause: The release process has no mandatory load/performance testing step.
Corrective Actions:
Add automated load test to CI pipeline (DevOps lead, 30 Aug)
Set memory alerts at 80% usage (SRE team, 22 Aug)
Update release checklist and train team (Eng manager, 20 Aug)
Cheers!
Khawaja Rizwan
