The Family Pre-Mortem
Inspired by on Lenny's Podcast
Before the road trip: imagine it's an hour in and everyone's screaming. What went wrong? Didn't bring snacks. Forgot the tablet charger. Left at naptime.
Shreyas Doshi borrowed an idea from psychology: the pre-mortem. Before a big launch, you gather the team and say: 'Imagine this has failed miserably. It's six months from now and it's a disaster. What went wrong?' This unlocks insight that people were afraid to share.
Parents can do this too. Before the road trip: 'Imagine we're an hour in and everyone is screaming. What happened?' (We forgot snacks. We didn't charge the tablet. We left at naptime.) Before the birthday party: 'This went horribly wrong. Why?' (Too many kids. Not enough supervision. The piñata was a mistake.)
The magic is in the prompt. 'What could go wrong?' feels negative. 'Imagine it failed - what caused it?' feels like a fun puzzle. It gives everyone permission to voice concerns they were holding back.
Shreyas uses three categories: Tigers (real threats that will kill us), Paper Tigers (things others worry about but you don't), and Elephants (the thing in the room nobody's talking about).
Before your next family adventure, do a pre-mortem. You'll either prevent the disaster or at least feel less surprised when it happens.
PM Theme: Risk management / pre-mortems
Parenting Theme: Planning for family events
“The initial prompt is the genius, which is the prompt starts with, imagine this project that we are working on has failed six months from now... Now, let's work backwards from there and ask ourselves what went wrong.”Shreyas Doshi · 25:47
“One is a tiger. So you can bring up tigers. A tiger is a threat that will actually kill us. The other is paper tiger. So this is a seeming threat that others might be worried about, but you're not worried about. And then the last one is elephant. The elephant in the room that nobody is talking about.”Shreyas Doshi · 27:51
