How Meta and Instagram Use Pre-Mortems to Avoid Post-Mortems

A Free Pre-Mortem Template. Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants.

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Today, we’re thrilled to welcome

Yue Zhao

—CPTO, Coach, and Author. In this issue, she shares insights on pre-mortems, a technique she's used for 15+ years, including at Instagram and Meta.

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Yue Zhao is a Chief Product and Technology Officer turned Coach who helps women and minority leaders break through to the C-suite. She has coached hundreds of aspiring executives since 2016, is an instructor at Reforge and Maven, and author of The Uncommon Executive: Breakthrough to the C-suite as a Minority.

Prior, Yue spent 15+ years as a product executive in Silicon Valley. She was the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Fuzzy Pet Health, PM manager at Meta and Instagram, and first PM at Thumbtack. She has also been a VC-backed founder, venture partner at LifeX Ventures, and a consultant at McKinsey and Company. Yue has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Many engineering teams run post-mortems when there is a failure or error. The team needs to come together to discuss what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again (not to assign blame or point fingers).

But what if we could anticipate and prevent these failures before they happen? Enter the pre-mortem.

Pre-mortems are a powerful tool that the best product teams at Google, Meta, Stripe, and others use regularly to increase the probability of a successful product launch and avoid difficult-to-recover failures. 

In this post, I'll share how pre-mortems can benefit your team and provide actionable steps to run an effective session.

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1. What Is a Pre-Mortem?

The goal of the pre-mortem meeting is to prevent the problems that cause a post-mortem meeting from happening. 

At the pre-mortem meeting, everyone is encouraged to voice their concerns and fears about an upcoming product launch, new strategic direction, or newly recommended process. It allows the team working on the project to think through risks, critical junctures, and concerns and address potential issues.

Pre-mortems are essential for product development teams to increase the probability of a successful product launch and avoid difficult-to-recover failures.