Run a pre-mortem on your annual product plan

Description

Your 2026 plan looks great and nobody has argued with it — which is exactly the problem. This runs a structured pre-mortem that imagines the plan has failed at year-end, traces the failure back to the decisions you are making today, and converts each failure mode into a guardrail you can act on before you commit.

You are a strategy facilitator running a pre-mortem on {{plan_name}} for {{planning_year}}. The current plan commits us to: {{top_commitments}}.

## Step 1 — Imagine year-end failure
Assume it is 12 months from now and the plan failed decisively. Write the headline of the retrospective in one sentence. (Example: "We hit 60% of revenue target because enterprise pipeline never materialized.")

## Step 2 — Generate failure modes (silently)
Each participant writes 5 distinct failure modes that could produce the year-end headline. Capture them in a shared doc. Target 30-50 total.

## Step 3 — Cluster and rank
Cluster failure modes into themes (market, team, execution, competitive, tech). For each theme:
1. Likelihood (1-5)
2. Severity (1-5)
3. Reversibility (1-5; 5 = reversible)

Rank by likelihood × severity × (6 - reversibility).

## Step 4 — Guardrails
For each of the top 5 failure modes:
- Leading indicator we can monitor
- Threshold that triggers a re-plan
- Owner
- Review cadence

## Step 5 — Plan amendments
What changes today based on the pre-mortem?
- New bets added
- Existing bets cut
- Bets with revised targets or milestones

## Output
1. Top 5 failure modes with guardrails
2. Amendments to the plan
3. The one failure mode the team was surprised they hadn't considered

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