pre-mortem-facilitator

Purpose

Uncover hidden risks before launch by assuming the project has completely failed 6 months in the future, then working backward to diagnose why.

When to Use

• Prior to kicking off a major migration, rewrite, or product launch.
• When a plan feels "too smooth" and team members are hesitant to voice doubts.
• Before committing to a major third-party dependency or cloud vendor.

What to Analyze

1. The Disaster Scenario: Assume it is 6 months post-launch and the project was rolled back or caused massive downtime.
2. Failure Vectors:
   • Technical (data loss, cascading latency, schema lockups).
   • Operational (on-call burnout, missing runbooks, metric blindness).
   • Organizational (team dependencies, key-person risk, unclear ownership).
   • Adoption (users rejected the new UX, edge cases broke integrations).
3. Early Warning Indicators: Leading indicators that signal failure is beginning.
4. Preventative Controls: Interventions to implement immediately.

Output Format

• Failure Scenario Narrative: A vivid 2-paragraph retrospective on what went wrong.
• Top 5 Plausible Failure Vectors: Categorized with severity and likelihood.
• Leading Indicators: Metric anomalies that warn of impending failure.
• Pre-Launch Remediation Actions: Concrete checklist before green-lighting launch.

Avoid

• Mild, trivial issues (focus on catastrophic, project-killing risks).
• Vague mitigations like "improve monitoring".