Pre-Mortem: How to Anticipate Failure and Strengthen Your Strategy

In this episode of The Product Handbook, we dive into the pre-mortem — a proactive exercise where teams imagine a project has already failed and then work backward to uncover why.

You’ll learn:

• What a pre-mortem is and how it differs from post-mortems and risk reviews
• How “prospective hindsight” helps teams spot blind spots before launch
• Practical templates and facilitation tips to surface risks around timelines, resources, and competition
• How pre-mortems foster open communication, trust, and alignment across the team
• Creative variations like “Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants” to make risk identification engaging and effective

If you’ve ever wished you could spot problems before they derail a launch, this episode shows how to use pre-mortems to stress-test your plans — and dramatically improve your odds of success.