Pre-Mortem Working Backwards in Software Design - Seema Thapar, PayPal

This resource first appeared in issue #86 on 06 Aug 2021 and has tags Strategy: Project Management, Strategy: Risk Management

Pre-Mortem: Working Backwards in Software Design - Seema Thapar, PayPal

We haven’t talked about premortems (#12, #43) in a while. If you don’t recall, the process - sometimes part of a project kickoff - is to have a well-posed project and then to ask the team to imagine that it’s finished, and it has failed. What has gone wrong?

Thapar gives us a particularly nice overview the why of premortems here, and describes how they’re run at PayPal. They start with a 1-pager describing the user story, get all the teams involved who would be involved with implementing it, and then asks them to suggest failure modes while the project is still nascent and can be shaped.

Thapar lists the advantages of such an approach:

• Psychological safety - those who might be hesitant to point out problems in other contexts are being explicitly encouraged to (and rewarded for) pointing out problems
• Breaks down team silos - the whole big picture is being discussed, and crossing silos is really important because it’s at silo boundaries where issues often arise
• Lots of mentoring and coaching opportunities, and good for team engagement
• The provided one-pager can then be the source of truth for everything else during the project, all the way to acceptance testing.

She also gives a piece of advice I hadn’t seen: “Diverge before Converge” - solicit a wide range of feedback first, then start developing a consensus around priority areas.