How to use the Dependency failure map template

Start a board from it
Use this template opens a new Freero board with the Dependency failure map template on it (sign up free first). On a board you already have, open Templates in the toolbar and search for “Dependency failure map”.
Follow the instruction on the board
“Draw only what the service calls directly. For each one ask “what if it is slow?” as well as “what if it is down?”: slow usually hurts more.”
Fill in each part
- Customer database When it fails, what do users see?
- Fraud check When it fails, what do users see?
- Payment provider When it fails, what do users see?
- Checkout service The service under review and what it must always do.
- Stock service When it fails, what do users see?
- Email service When it fails, what do users see?
Bring your team and your agents
Invite people to the board or share a link, and work on it together live. The timer is in the top bar, private mode and voting in the board menu, and Claude or ChatGPT can join through Freero’s MCP server.

Work on it with an AI agent

Connect an assistant once and it works on the board with you, with your permissions: by default it reads and proposes, and people decide.

You ask: “Fill in the Dependency failure map board from these notes.”
What happens It reads the board, then proposes sticky notes for it. Nothing changes until someone on the board accepts them.
You ask: “Group what we wrote into themes and list the actions.”
What happens It proposes clusters with a title each and task cards for the actions, labelled with its name and yours.

Service level objectives
Agree reliability targets from the user’s side: the journeys that matter, how to measure them, the target and what happens when you miss.
Failure modes review
Go step by step through a process and ask how each step could fail, how bad it would be, how likely, and how you’d catch it.
Error budget policy
Agree in advance what the team does as a service uses up its allowance for failure, from business as usual to stopping releases.
Game day plan
Plan a practice failure in a safe window: what you break, what you expect to happen, how you stop it and what you learn.
Postmortem action tracker
Follow the fixes agreed in incident reviews through to done, so the same failure doesn’t come back next quarter.
Sequence diagram
A sign-in flow as UML lifelines, activation bars, calls, replies and an alt fragment.