planning · PromptZap Team

Pre-Mortem Risk Scan

Gary Klein's pre-mortem as a prompt: imagine the launch already failed, work backward through 8-10 failure modes, mitigate the cheap-now ones.

Framework

standard

Model targets

claude, chatgpt, gemini

Prompt text

We're about to ship/launch [project/decision]. Run a pre-mortem: imagine it's 3 months from now and this has failed badly. Work backward from that failure.

Generate 8-10 plausible ways it could have failed, spanning: technical risk, market/user-adoption risk, timeline/execution risk, and "the plan was fine but we didn't monitor for X" risk. For each, rate likelihood (low/med/high) and severity, and suggest one concrete mitigation or early-warning signal to watch for now, before launch.

Prioritize the ones where "likelihood x severity" is highest and where the mitigation is cheap to do now but expensive to fix later.