Do you do a product launch pre-mortem with your internal stakeholders before a product launch and if so, who do you include and what is your process for running it?

I’ve led pre-mortems at various stages of product - from early product concept, to alpha/beta stage, to immediately pre-launch. Pre-mortems are valuable exercises (and I think they’re fun!). They help teams examine their assumptions, surface concerns without being painted as downers, and come to a response plan as a group. For a pre-mortem, I bias on the side of including more folks than not. It’ll also depend on the nature of the product and launch. At a minimum, I always include PM, research, ...Read More

For a full-scale launch, yes, I do a pre-mortem about a month ahead of time so there is time to act on any key risk-mitigation activities before launch date.  I like to do an async brainstorm in a google sheet with two tabs. 🤕 Everything failed miserably... 🤩Everything was beyond our dreams! The prompt for tab 1 Imagine we launched product X...We thought we did everything we could, but the product is not taking off like we hoped.  What did we do that we SHOULDN'T have done or what did we NOT do ...Read More

I think it’s very familiar in PMM to be combing through everything the night before a launch and feel a little anxiety! We typically handle this “pre-mortem” work in two ways: Strategic: Document and address the risks as they come up. I have a “Risks and Considerations” slide in my launch deck that I use as my scratchpad for everything that surfaces during launch preparations. Generally, I raise these with the appropriate stakeholders and try to work through them as they come up, rather than wai ...Read More

We don't call it a pre-mortem, but we have two documents that help us facilitate constructive discussion. A GTM handover document that the PM fills out, and a product launch template that we fill out in detail that includes messaging, goals, risks, channels. Once we craft the messaging and general strategy and we run it past the product team and head of product to make sure we are aligned before executing. We usually record a Loom explaining the approach and share it in Slack.  Another major par ...Read More

In my experience, this is something we’ve done for Level 1 or Level 2 launches that involve dozens of stakeholders across various functions. The goal for these pre-mortems is really to anticipate pitfalls and increase project success, whether that’s simply by eliminating the fear around negative outcomes or identifying potential mitigations that can be put in place to avoid those altogether. The key players in sessions like this are typically PMM, EPD (Engineering/Product/Design), Enablement and ...Read More