Hi there,
When I started out in growth, I worked at an agency that sistered with a development agency.
So a lot of our projects involved launching brand-new websites.
Amazing, a fresh slate to apply all our customer insights and (hopefully) improve performance.
But also terrifying.
Not the work itself, but the waiting.
That horrible stretch after you’ve shipped something, when you’re refreshing dashboards, over-analysing early feedback, and catastrophising every tiny dip in the numbers.
What helped me wasn’t positive thinking.
It was the opposite: deliberately imagining everything that could go wrong before we launched.
It’s called a pre-mortem — and it’s become one of my favourite planning tools.
What is a pre-mortem?
A regular post-mortem happens after something fails. You gather the team, ask “what went wrong,” and try to learn from it.
A pre-mortem flips this. Before you launch, you imagine it’s three months later, and the launch has completely flopped.
Then you ask: why did it fail?
This isn’t pessimism. It’s risk-surfacing while you can still do something about it.
The things you come up with in a pre-mortem are usually things you already half-know but haven’t said out loud.
Getting them on paper means you can either fix them now or have a plan ready if they happen.
How to run a pre-mortem in just 20 minutes
You can do this alone or with your team. Here’s the process using a product launch as an example:
Step 1: Set the scene
“It’s [date 2-3 months from now]. This launch has failed. Not a minor disappointment, but a proper flop. What happened?”
Step 2: List every reason it might have failed
Write down everything, even if it feels unlikely. Common ones I see:
We couldn’t reach enough of our target audience
The people who showed up weren’t who we expected
They didn’t understand what it was or why they’d want it
They tried it but didn’t see the value quickly enough
The price felt wrong (too high, too low, confusing)
A competitor launched something similar at the same time
We got bad press or reviews early on
The team burned out before we could iterate
Step 3: For each risk, ask three questions
How likely is it to happen? (Importance assessment)
Can we reduce the likelihood of this happening? (Mitigate)
If it happens anyway, what will we do? (Backup plan)
Step 4: Write your “if/then” statements
This is the most useful output. For example:
If activation is below 10%, we’ll simplify the first-time experience and retest
If we attract the wrong customers, we’ll adjust our targeting and messaging before scaling spend
If nobody hits the paywall, we’ll move it earlier and test different copy
If feedback says it doesn’t solve their problem, we’ll pause and do more customer interviews
This is the short version, I wrote a full guide to pre-mortems here.
Why this actually helps
Three reasons:
1. It makes the fear concrete
Vague anxiety is paralysing. Specific risks are manageable.
Once you’ve written “what if no one buys” on paper and created a plan for it, it stops being a nameless dread and becomes just another scenario to handle.
Consider it a bit of growth therapy.
2. It removes panic from decision-making
When something goes wrong post-launch, you’re stressed. You have stakeholders asking questions. You’re tempted to make reactive decisions.
If you’ve already decided “if X happens, we do Y,” you don’t have to figure it out under pressure. You just execute the plan.
3. It gives you permission to take action imperfectly
In the case of product launches get delayed because of fear (or supply issues… joys of physical products).
The pre-mortem helps you see that even if things go wrong, you have a path forward. That makes it easier to ship.
A real example
Before launching a new subscription tier for a client last year, we ran a quick pre-mortem.
One of the risks we identified: “Existing customers feel cheated that new customers get a better deal.”
We couldn’t fully prevent this as the new tier was better value. But having named it, we prepared:
Messaging for existing customers explaining what they were getting
A one-time offer for loyal subscribers to switch
Prepared responses for the support team
I really believed it resulted in far fewer complaints (mainly from customers who missed the updates).
When to use this
Pre-mortems work in a lot of scenarios:
New product or SKU
Subscription model changes
Pricing changes
New market or channel
Rebrands or major website changes
Paid campaign pushes
I even do it with new advisory clients to ensure I can help them as best as possible and drive impact.
Basically, anything where failure would hurt, and you’d want to have thought it through.
Recommendation
In every edition of Growth Waves, I also share a resource to check out related to the week’s topic.
The pre-mortem concept comes from psychologist Gary Klein. If you want to go deeper, his book The Power of Intuition covers it well, along with other decision-making frameworks.
For a quicker read, I’ve written a more in-depth guide about conducting a pre-mortem here.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” is a Navy SEAL saying that is true in growth, too.
But having a plan, especially a plan for what to do when things go wrong, makes the whole thing less terrifying.
Try it before your next big project.
Twenty minutes of imagining failure might be the most productive time you spend.
Till next time,
Daphne