The post-mortem is the structured record of what happened on a bid. Completing one adds its lessons to your team's knowledge base, which BidBot draws on when writing future answers and which surfaces in Learning Insights.
This is where an individual bid's experience becomes something the whole team can use. A bid without a completed post-mortem teaches nobody anything.
Where to find it
Open the project and go to the Outcome tab.
Select the Post-mortem sub-tab.
Draft it from your feedback
If you have already added sources, let BidScript do the first pass.
Click Auto-draft from feedback.
BidScript reads your feedback documents and pre-fills the fields it can infer — scores, themes, win and loss reasons, and the narrative sections.
Review each AI-suggested field. Every one carries an indicator showing it was suggested rather than entered.
Confirm or edit each suggestion.
You cannot mark the post-mortem complete until every suggestion has been reviewed. Treat the auto-draft as a starting point — it can only infer what your sources actually said.
To add sources first, see Adding client feedback.
Evaluator scores
Overall score | The total score the evaluator gave. |
Out of | The maximum possible score — 100, for example. |
Score breakdown | Individual scores per criterion, such as Quality, Price or Social Value. Add as many rows as you need. |
Outcome reason
These fields appear only when the project status is Won, Lost or Cancelled, and change depending on which.
Outcome category | A fixed taxonomy category capturing the primary reason for the outcome. You can add your own custom win or loss categories from this field. |
Why we won | Free-text narrative covering evaluator comments, pricing, differentiators and relationship factors. |
Detailed loss reason | An optional dropdown giving a more granular breakdown. |
Use the taxonomy category consistently across bids. Its value is that it aggregates — free text does not.
Themes
Positive themes | Recurring strengths or positive signals from this bid. |
Negative themes | Recurring weaknesses or concerns. |
Narrative
All four narrative fields are required before a post-mortem can be marked complete.
What worked | Concrete answers, sections or approaches the evaluators responded well to. |
What didn't | Weaknesses, gaps or concerns the evaluators raised. |
What we learned | Principles or patterns that should change how you bid next time. |
Recommendations for next bid | Specific, actionable steps for future bids in this domain or with this client. |
Be concrete in these fields. "Our social value response was weak" teaches less than "our social value response gave no local employment figures, which the evaluator called out directly" — and BidBot can act on the second.
Mark it complete
Click Mark complete once all required fields are filled and every AI suggestion has been reviewed.
The lessons are added to your team library immediately, and become available to BidBot and Learning Insights.
Reopen a completed post-mortem
Click Reopen to make changes after completing it. The post-mortem returns to Draft status, and its lessons are re-indexed when you mark it complete again.
Related articles
Adding client feedback — the sources the auto-draft reads from.
Outcome Area: Overview — the three sub-tabs and the order to work through them.
Improving answers with feedback — acting on what the post-mortem surfaces.