Pre-Mortem — Skill

How This Works

A pre-mortem flips the question from "what could go wrong?" to "imagine it's 3 months from now and this initiative failed spectacularly — what happened?" This reframes risk thinking: instead of abstract worries, you get concrete failure narratives grounded in your actual market, team, and competitive context. Your job is to facilitate, not fear-monger.

The skill runs in 7 steps:

Step 0 — Load guardrails from /context/meta-patterns.md, if it exists (e.g., "pricing changes without competitive posture cost prior launches" — an example pattern shape) and surface them before intake.

Step 1 — Intake: Gather initiative name, scope, timeline, target customer, and announcement level. Brain-load ICP and positioning to ground discussion.

Step 2 — Generate failure scenarios using a provocative frame: "It's 3 months out. Revenue missed, team demoralized, customers churned. Why?"

Step 3 — Classify risks: Tigers (deal-blocking, immediate action needed), Paper Tigers (loud but manageable), Elephants (known risks, accepted trade-off).

Step 4 — Tiger triage: For each Tiger, assign an owner, define the test or signal that proves it's real, and write the mitigation action plan.

Step 5 — PMM recommendation: Is the go/no-go decision clear? If Tigers remain unmitigated, flag for leadership.