Pre-mortems: How a Stripe Product Manager prevents problems before launch

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Pre-mortems: How a Stripe Product Manager prevents problems before launch

Pre-mortem meeting

Prevent future threats by running a pre-mortem meeting with your team.

Copy this template, clear the sample data, and share this doc with your team. Then, delete these instructions and follow the steps below.

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Copy template

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Clear sample data

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Pre-mortem details

Project name: [project name]

Meeting driver: type @...

Meeting date:

5/25/2023

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Timer:

-

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Start timer

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Minutes:

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End time:

Thursday 12:00 AM

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Step 1: Meeting kickoff & prompt

10 mins

Welcome to our

pre-mortem⁠

! Everyone should have this doc open, ready to brainstorm together.

Imagine we’re 3 months in the future and this project has failed spectacularly. What caused the failure? This exercise will help us identify and prevent those threats before they happen. We’ll classify potential failures into three categories:

🐅 Tiger - A clear threat that will hurt us if we don’t do something about it.

🐯 Paper Tiger - An ostensible threat that you are personally not worried about (but others might be).

🐘 Elephant - The thing that you’re concerned the team is not talking about.

Ready to get started? Head to step 2.

Step 2: Quietly brainstorm threats.

10 mins

Everyone quietly brainstorms threats in the table below. Each person should add at least 2 tigers, and as many paper tigers and elephants as needed. Leave the switch off so only your own ideas are shown.

I’m done brainstorming

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Add threat

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Show everyone’s ideas

Threats

Threats

Author

Type

Upvote

Author

Threat

Type

Upvote

Notes

Worried we haven’t tested all the edge cases on mobile app

🐯 Paper Tiger

Open

Might be some PR backlash on new face recognition software.

🐘 Elephant

Open

Photo tagging involves manual work for quality team.

🐅 Tiger

Open

Ops team will have to change their processes

🐅 Tiger

Open

Consumers might not be used to new form factor of computer.

🐘 Elephant

Open

Floppy disks are too easy to bend. Customers might complain.

🐯 Paper Tiger

Open

There are no rows in this table

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Step 3: Quiet voting & group discussion.

10 mins voting, 20 mins discussion.

Flip the switch above to show everyone’s ideas. Then, quietly read and vote on the threats you think are most important. Limit 5 votes per person to focus the discussion. Finally, go around the room, each person sharing which threat(s) resonated most. Take notes as you go.

I’m done voting

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Step 4: Draft an action plan

10 mins

Meeting driver: Group the biggest threats into themes, propose mitigating actions, and assign an owner to ensure the mitigations happen. Then share the action plan with your team.

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Add theme

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Action plan

Action plan

Theme

Related threats

Proposed Mitigating Actions

Owner

Privacy

Worried we haven’t tested all the edge cases on mobile app

Might be some PR backlash on new face recognition software.

Do comprehensive QA process

Set-up day-of-launch war room

Alan Chowansky

Operations

Ops team will have to change their processes

Photo tagging involves manual work for quality team.

Communicate out plan with operations leads before launch

Do premortem with ops team

Lola Tseudonym

Customers

Floppy disks are too easy to bend. Customers might complain.

Consumers might not be used to new form factor of computer.

Run a free trial in a single market

Survey potential customers

Maria Marquis

There are no rows in this table

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