Pre-mortems are a great way to generate assumptions. They leverage prospective hindsight—a technique where you imagine what might happen in the future. A pre-mortem encourages you to ask, “Imagine it’s six months in the future; your product or initiative launched, and it was a complete failure. What went wrong?” As you generate reasons for why your product or service might fail, you are exposing assumptions that your idea depends upon that may not be true. The success of pre-mortems, however, hinges on one key factor—phrasing the question as if the outcome is certain. In our case, that means
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How to do an effective pre mortem
