Product launch pre-mortem
Fourteen failure scenarios across technical, market, and team categories. BoardSnap identified five starred risks and generated fifteen mitigation action items — three of which the team hadn't assigned an owner to yet.
Use case
Imagine the failure before it happens — then actually document it.
BoardSnap is an iOS app that captures whiteboard pre-mortem sessions and turns imagined failure scenarios, root causes, and mitigation plans into a structured risk register with action items.
Download on the
App Store
Free to start. Pro from $9.99/mo or $69.99/yr.
The problem
A pre-mortem is one of the most valuable exercises a team can run before a launch, major decision, or risky project. You imagine it's six months later and the project has failed — then you work backwards to figure out why.
The exercise generates critical information: the failure modes your team can actually see coming. But pre-mortems are notoriously hard to document. The board fills up with scenarios, arrows, root causes, and probability estimates. Then someone says 'great session' and walks out.
Two months later, when one of those failure modes actually starts to materialize, nobody remembers the mitigation plan you sketched in the lower right corner. It's on the board — and the board was erased.
The workflow
- State the project and success criteria at the top
Write one line: what the project is and what 'success' means. This anchors every failure scenario BoardSnap reads to the same baseline.
- Generate failure scenarios
Each scenario gets a label and a brief description. Don't filter — bad ideas get erased, silence doesn't. Aim for ten to twenty scenarios before clustering.
- Cluster by category
Group scenarios: technical failures, market failures, resource failures, external dependencies. Circles or column headers work. BoardSnap reads both.
- Rate probability and impact
Write P: and I: next to each cluster (or scenario). High probability + high impact items get a star. These become immediate action items.
- Define mitigations
For each starred risk, write one or two mitigations. Name who owns each one inline. This is the part that usually doesn't make it out of the room — BoardSnap captures it.
- Snap and distribute
One snap. BoardSnap produces a risk register: each risk category with its scenarios, ratings, mitigations, and owners. Paste it into your project kickoff doc.
What you get
A risk register built from the whiteboard: failure scenarios grouped by category, probability and impact ratings, starred high-priority risks, and mitigation actions with owners. Each mitigation becomes a tri-state action item. The output is formatted to paste into a project brief, kickoff doc, or risk tracking tool.
Real examples
Partnership decision pre-mortem
A thirty-minute whiteboard session before signing a major vendor contract. BoardSnap's risk register surfaced two high-probability risks the contract team hadn't addressed, leading to a contract amendment before signing.
Frequently asked
How is a pre-mortem different from a risk assessment?
A risk assessment is systematic and usually document-driven. A pre-mortem is narrative and generative — you 'live' the failure to surface risks that systematic analysis misses. They complement each other. The pre-mortem board is great for the generative phase; BoardSnap captures it so it feeds the formal risk register.
Who should be in a pre-mortem session?
Everyone who has skin in the game: the lead, key contributors, and at least one skeptic. The skeptic's job is to push on the optimistic assumptions. BoardSnap captures all of their input regardless of who writes on the board.
Can I run a solo pre-mortem?
Yes. Solo pre-mortems are underrated — they're fast, honest, and unconstrained by social dynamics. Snap the board at the end and you have a personal risk register for the project.
Does the free tier cover pre-mortem sessions?
Yes. The free tier gives you one project and 30 boards. A pre-mortem is typically one or two snaps. Pro unlocks unlimited projects if you're running pre-mortems across multiple clients or products.
Run your next pre-mortem with BoardSnap.
Snap the board, ship the action items in ten seconds.
Free · 1 project, 30 boards
Pro $9.99/mo · everything unlimited
Pro $69.99/yr · save 42%