Pre-mortem
Imagine the project has already failed, then write down why. Fix those causes before you start.
A post-mortem explains a failure after it happens. A pre-mortem does it in advance. Before launch, the team assumes it’s six months later and the project went badly, and each person writes down what went wrong.
When we launched our own payment gateway for financial institutions, a detailed pre-mortem listed the issues to watch for. We fixed problems in advance and built monitoring for the risky parts, and we went live with confidence, handling a large volume of transactions from day one.
How to run one
- Gather the people closest to the work.
- Say: “It’s launched, and it failed. Why?”
- Everyone writes reasons on their own first, so loud voices don’t anchor the room.
- Group the reasons, rank them by likelihood and damage, and assign an owner to the top few.
It is inversion turned into a meeting.
In practice
- Read Invert to Win in Inversion, where it’s part of the story.