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.

Core Capabilities

• Prospective hindsight framing — "It is 14 days after launch, and we failed. Why?" surfaces specific, honest risks.
• Tiger / Paper Tiger / Elephant classification — separate real evidenced risks (Tigers) from anxiety (Paper Tigers) and unspoken concerns (Elephants).
• Urgency triage — tag each Tiger Launch-Blocking, Fast-Follow, or Track with owner and decision date.
• 6-phase facilitation — scene-setting, silent generation, cluster, classify, mitigate, address elephants in 60-90 minutes.
• Automated categorization — risk_categorizer.py summarizes distribution and flags elephants needing escalation.

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.