Pre-Mortem Strategy: Identifying Risks Before They Become Reality

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Imagine your team launching a new product, and everyone is excited until reality sets in! The users are complaining, and the sales are dropping. Here comes the pre-mortem strategy for the rescue, a planning technique where a team envisions a failed product before it even hits the market. A pre-mortem is a risk assessment that takes place before the product has been launched or the project begins.

What is the pre-mortem strategy?

The pre mortem strategy is a technique that allows the team to imagine potential failure or identify risks of the product before they begin to prevent costly mistakes. It helps the team to make sure that the products meet the user’s needs.

The inversion principle

The heart and core of the postmortem strategy is the inversion principle, which means thinking about the problem backwards. Instead of asking, “How can I succeed?” instead, it focusses on “How can I fail?” This technique helps you see the prospects of failure that you might not notice otherwise and leads you to a better decision-making process.

How does pre-mortem work?

As we now know, pre mortem is a technique and strategy that involves taking a project or idea and instead of focusing only on how it can be successful, the team envisions what can lead it to failure. In this way they can work backwards and can identify all the problems that might lead to the products or projects’ failure. This is the best way to prevent product failure before it is even launched.

Steps to run a pre-mortem

Here are the steps on how to run a pre mortem:

Set the stage:

Gather your team members and give them a worst-case scenario. Ask them that the product has been launched but is facing failure. What do they think could be the reasons behind the failure of the product? The purpose of doing so is that they will have a safe environment where they can share their thoughts without being too negative.

Identifying potential failures early:

The next step is to encourage the team members to write all the possible reasons why the product failed. They can write about factors such as technical challenges, customer misunderstandings, competitive pressures, missed market trends and more.

Analyze and address the Risks

Analyz each risk factor and see how likely it can happen and how much it will impact? Then work on the mitigation strategy to reduce or eliminate the risk that can happen.

Create Action Plan

Make sure that each risk area has its own manager to control and manage the problem. Develop a contingency plan and reassess the risk, check for it again to make sure no other issues have emerged.

 

 

Benefits of pre-mortem

Here are the benefits of pre mortem strategy:

  • Identifies risks before time.
  • Promote teamwork.
  • Create a safe environment to discuss failures.
  • Break down silos and encourage the team to use their collective intelligence.
  • Reduce or eliminate lessen cognitive biases such as over confidence.

Concerns related to pre-mortem strategy technique

Pre-mortem is the strategy that helps the team identify the potential problems of a product or project before time, but some people have different views and concerns about it such as:

  • Negative bias and over caution.
  • Time and resource constraint.
  • Stressful and might create unnecessary anxiety.
  • Difficulty in prioritizing risks.
  • Over thinking and debating which might cause delay.

Conclusion

In this blog we have discussed the pre-mortem strategy and technique that help the team members to identify the problems before time and find solutions. By envisioning possible failures, one can work on it and make sure that the final product is well aligned according to the user’s needs and market expectations. On the one hand, the pre-mortem strategy has its own benefits such as identifying risks before time, lessening cognitive biases, encouraging teams to use collective intelligence and more. On the other hand, people have their own concerns related to this strategy such as focusing too much on negative things that might not happen, over thinking, and more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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