A key, often overlooked benefit of a premortem is that it forces a team to agree on the project's objectives. To imagine a launch has failed six months later, the team must first have a shared, concrete definition of what success would have looked like, preventing misalignment down the line.
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During product discovery, Amazon teams ask, "What would be our worst possible news headline?" This pre-mortem practice forces the team to identify and confront potential weak points, blind spots, and negative outcomes upfront. It's a powerful tool for looking around corners and ensuring all bases are covered before committing to build.
Extend premortems beyond failure scenarios to consider overwhelming success. This reframes success as a potential failure if you're unprepared, helping teams proactively identify and plan for scaling risks and organizational readiness before they become critical issues.
Premortems are not just for project kickoffs. They are a powerful diagnostic tool when a project feels 'off track' or when teams are 'speaking from different sheets of music.' This can surface misalignments and communication breakdowns that sprint retrospectives might not catch.
Before a major initiative, run a simple thought experiment: what are the best and worst possible news headlines? If the worst-case headline is indefensible from a process, intent, or PR perspective, the risk may be too high. This forces teams to confront potential negative outcomes early.
A pre-mortem asks a team to imagine their project has already failed spectacularly. By explaining the hypothetical failure, they uncover potential risks and can build mitigation strategies, effectively using the power of hindsight bias in advance.
Avoid using premortems for vague, ongoing work like platform backlogs. Without a concrete launch or decision to frame the 'failure' against, the exercise loses focus. It devolves into a session for venting about team dynamics rather than identifying actionable, project-specific risks.
The 'fake press release' is a useful vision-setting tool, but a 'pre-mortem' is more tactical. It involves writing out two scenarios before a project starts: one detailing exactly *why* it succeeded (e.g., team structure, metrics alignment) and another detailing *why* it failed. This forces a proactive discussion of process and risks, not just the desired outcome.
Instead of waiting for a postmortem after failing, conduct a 'premortem' at the start. Proactively contemplating the specific obstacles that might prevent you from achieving your goals is a critical first step. This pessimistic-sounding exercise allows you to identify barriers like impulsivity or laziness and design solutions for them.
Leaders often assume goal alignment. A simple exercise is to ask each team member to articulate the project's goal in their own words. The resulting variety in answers immediately highlights where alignment is needed before work begins, preventing wasted effort on divergent paths.
Before starting a project, ask the team to imagine it has failed and write a story explaining why. This exercise in 'time travel' bypasses optimism bias and surfaces critical operational risks, resource gaps, and flawed assumptions that would otherwise be missed until it's too late.
