You've Heard About a Post-Mortem, but What About a Pre-Mortem? | #50

Use this guide to understand and implement the Pre-Mortem process, ensuring your team identifies potential project pitfalls before they occur.

What is a Pre-Mortem?

If you work in Tech, you have more than likely dealt with at least one Post-Mortem at some stage in your career. If not, it is the reflective process that teams do after incidents or a project’s completion to see what went wrong and what could be improved.

But what if we could foresee potential failures before they happen? This is where the pre-mortem comes into play.

A pre-mortem is a proactive strategy where a team sits down before all the bad things happen and the project has failed and then works backward to try and imagine what could lead to such a failure.

I heard this last week on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast (I’m catching up - I’m only new!) when he was talking to Shreyas Doshi and thought it was a great idea. I’m not at the stage where I actually need it in my new role just yet, but I will be soon and wanted to get it onto my Miro Discovery Template while the idea was fresh in my mind.

This technique allows you and your team to preemptively address potential risks and challenges, which could actually increase the likelihood of your project succeeding.

I’m a big believer in spending a decent portion of your capacity (20%!) on tech debt, and fixing things the team come up with during one of these sessions are obviously things the team care about, which you’ll understand once you see the process below.

Why Conduct a Pre-Mortem?

The primary advantage of a pre-mortem is its focus on foresight rather than hindsight. By anticipating problems before they arise, your team can:

• Identify risks early: Pinpoint potential issues and address them before they escalate.

• Enhance team collaboration: Encourage open communication and collective problem-solving.

• Improve project outcomes: Increase the likelihood of project success by mitigating risks proactively.

How to Conduct a Pre-Mortem

I like standardising different templates, so they all look similar. This will make it a lot easier and quicker to run in the long term, as you cut out the learning of the process so you can spending it on the doing the process. A Similar board was used in my north star ceremony instructions here: https://www.youngleaders.tech/p/how-to-create-outcomes-or-north-stars

Below is a step-by-step guide to running an effective pre-mortem session with your team. I’d suggest you also add this to your miro board (like I have) as people will want to refer to it during the session. There will be some quiet thinking time (no music - sorry!) where people get to add their thoughts in different points of the workshop.

1. Introduction and Goal Setting (5 Minutes)

• Explain the Purpose: Introduce the concept of a pre-mortem and its benefits.

• Set the Scene: Imagine the project has failed and explore possible reasons.

• Define the Objective: Identify potential issues to address proactively.

2. Individual Brainstorming (5 Minutes)

• Team members write down all possible reasons for project failure.

• Be Specific: Encourage detailed and specific reasons (e.g., "daily stand-up meetings were not effective" instead of "lack of communication").

3. Sharing and Group Discussion (5 Minutes)

• Each team member shares one reason at a time until all reasons are shared. Use the Miro board to capture all points, while slotting them into their definitions if possible.

• Group similar reasons together to identify common themes.

4. Prioritizing and Action Planning (5 Minutes)

• Each team member allocates a few votes to the issues they believe are most critical.

• Focus on the top-voted issues and discuss why these are seen as high risks.

5. Developing Mitigation Strategies (5 Minutes)

• For the top risks identified, brainstorm strategies or actions that can mitigate these risks. Assign a team member to each risk.

• Summarize the risks and mitigation strategies. Ensure there's a follow-up plan.

One of Shreya’s Methods

Shreyas Doshi, in this really good episode on Lenny's Newsletter, highlighted a unique way of categorizing potential risks using the metaphors of tigers, paper tigers, and elephants. These metaphors help teams to visualize and prioritize the risks more effectively:

• Tigers: (Things that can kill you)These are the obvious, immediate threats that could significantly derail your project. They require immediate attention and mitigation.
  Example: What happens if we get too many customers signing up and our infrastructure can’t keep up with the volume - do we need to plan for emergency scaling plans.

• Paper Tigers: (Things that look like they might kill you) These are perceived threats that may seem intimidating at first but are not as dangerous upon closer inspection. It's crucial to identify these to avoid unnecessary panic and misallocation of resources.
  Example: When a stakeholder thinks something bad will happen, but you know it can’t. That’s a sign of miscommunication, and your mitigation factor might just be some documentation about now you have mitigated this risk.

• Elephants: These are the large, often ignored issues that everyone knows about but no one talks about. Addressing these requires courage and honesty within the team.
  Example: We have this huge backlog of bugs and no capacity to spend on them. This derails our future plans if we want to provide a good customer UX. If this was the highest vote, this is your teams signal to leadership that this is non-negotiable and your mitigation factor might be an increase in % capacity spend on fixing bugs until the launch date

Incorporating these metaphors into your pre-mortem can provide a structured way to evaluate and prioritize the risks, ensuring that your team focuses on what truly matters. It also adds a different vector onto the whole thought process that I hadn’t seen before, which is pretty cool.

Benefits of Pre-Mortem

Conducting a pre-mortem can change the way your team approaches project planning. It encourages proactive thinking, fosters collaboration, and builds on the culture of continuous improvement I’m trying to instill in you.

By identifying potential pitfalls before they occur, you can steer your project toward success with greater confidence, both with your team and your stakeholders.

Incorporating pre-mortems into your project planning process can significantly enhance your team's ability to anticipate and manage risks. By imagining failure and working backward to prevent it, you empower your team to navigate challenges more effectively and deliver successful outcomes.

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