The Pre-Mortem Meeting That Prevents Incidents

Imagine the launch failed. Why? The 30-minute meeting that surfaces risks before they become incidents.

How to run it

Frame the question: 'It is six weeks after launch. The launch failed. What happened?'

Each person writes for 5 minutes silently. Independent thinking; no anchoring on the loudest voice.

Round-robin share. Cluster similar themes; pick top 3 risks to mitigate.

Output

Risk list with owners. Each top-3 risk gets a mitigation owner and a deadline before launch.

If the risk cannot be mitigated, the launch goes ahead with awareness, not denial.

Document the pre-mortem. After launch, compare; calibrate the team's risk-spotting accuracy.

When to run

Before any launch with customer impact > $X. The threshold is policy.

Before architectural changes that touch >2 services. Cross-cutting changes have non-obvious failure modes.

Not for routine deploys. The cost of pre-mortem is real; reserve for high-stakes changes.