Pre-Mortem Risk Analysis Expert

Overview

A pre-mortem is a prospective hindsight exercise: imagine that your product has launched and failed, then work backward to identify why. This skill uses the Tiger / Paper Tiger / Elephant classification to categorize risks by type and urgency, ensuring launch-blocking issues are addressed before launch while avoiding wasted effort on unlikely risks.

When to Use

• Before committing significant resources to build (post-ideation, post-validation).
• Before a major launch, migration, or architectural change.
• When the team has "a bad feeling" they cannot articulate.
• When stakeholder confidence is high and you need to stress-test it.

Core Concept

The Thought Experiment

"It is 14 days after launch. The product has failed. What went wrong?"

This framing exploits a cognitive bias: people are better at explaining past events than predicting future ones. By placing the failure in the "past" (even fictitiously), participants generate more specific and honest risk assessments.