Most Teams Treat Pre-Mortems Like Vitamins

Let’s talk pre- and post-mortems. They’re basically fancy retrospectives, just timed better. One at the start of a project, one at the end. Hence: pre and post. Not rocket science.

You’d be surprised how many issues could be avoided if teams just sat down before a project and asked:

• What do we think might go wrong?

• What are the landmines?

• What’s broken right now that could screw us later?

Depending on your background, maybe you’ve done this as a risk analysis, a risk backlog, or a SWOT session.

Even Caesar made a sort of Post Mortem with his commentaries on the Gaelic War

But in the end, it’s the same point:

Planning for disaster helps you not get blindsided by it.

The Art of Spotting Disasters Before They Happen

On a recent project, we already knew that there was an old legacy system, which had a bad habit of sending production data when it got set up in a new test environment. It had happened before.

So it was brought it up in a pre-mortem, everyone was aware. We had a plan. Nobody acted surprised when things got weird.

No firefighting. No finger-pointing. Just handled. And that’s the point. These sessions aren’t about being pessimistic. They’re about surfacing what people already suspect, getting it out in the open, and letting the whole team prep ahead of time.

Pre-mortems prevent panic. Post-mortems prevent repetition. Skip both and you're just waiting to repeat your last disaster.

Post-Mortems: Not Just for Corpses

I was talking with ChatGPT a couple of days ago about short-term vs long-term sales cycles. Same idea applies here.

A sale doesn’t end when the contract’s signed. Delivery matters. Follow-through matters. That’s how you keep customers. Same with projects, just because it shipped doesn’t mean you’re done.

You run post-mortems to prepare for the next one. What worked? What didn’t? What got in the way? How can we avoid it next time? You take notes. You share learnings across the company. You make sure every project leaves something behind besides just Jira tickets.

Whether you’re leading a project or just lost in Osaka, having a plan (and learning from the last one) makes the next step easier.

Build Once, Learn Forever

Look, pre- and post-mortems aren’t complicated. They’re just conversations. But they’re the kind of conversations that turn messy chaos into structured momentum. They stop the same mistakes from repeating every quarter. They get people aligned early and smarter later.

Most teams skip them. Yours doesn’t have to.