This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Guy Kawasaki: Conduct a Pre-mortem Meeting" created on March 7, 2011, where Guy Kawasaki discusses the concept of conducting a pre-mortem in business to identify potential failure points before a product launch, as opposed to a post-mortem after failure.
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You should conduct a pre mortem as opposed to a post mortem. A postmortem is something you do, obviously, after death. It's done to increase the peace of mind of the loved ones of the deceased. The problem with postmortems is, duh, it's too late. There's another problem with postmortems. Postmortems in business is really too late, because by the time a company implodes, most of the people have scattered to the winds. They're not going to stick around to the bitter end, okay? And even if they stuck around, a post mortem is very contentious. You know, you bozos wrote a piece of crap, as opposed to you bozos couldn't market this brilliant piece of software that I created. A lot of finger pointing, a lot of angst and anger. I suggest you do a pre. Mortem. And the way a pre mortem works is before you ship, you ask the team, let us pretend that our product, our company, failed. We failed. Now, what are all the possible reasons we could have failed? Lack of distribution, unsophisticated salesforce, buggy software, unreliable cloud services, whatever it is. So you come up with all these reasons, and then in unemotional ways, you talk about how you can eliminate each of those reasons. This is very different than pointing the finger and saying engineering is crap. Okay, what you're saying is this is a list of reasons. Let's conduct a pre mortem so that we never conduct a post mortem. Conduct the pre mortem.
