Pre-Mortem Custom Prompt: Kill Projects Before They Kill You

What This Is

A battle-tested pre-mortem prompt that surfaces project-killing risks before you ship anything.

Instead of running a meeting or managing templates, you paste one prompt into ChatGPT (or your AI of choice), answer a few guided questions, and get back a structured pre-mortem. It identifies failure modes, prioritizes risks by impact and likelihood, and forces concrete mitigation plans with owners.

This is the fastest way for a Microteam to think like a seasoned PM, CTO, and risk officer without hiring any of them.

Why You Need This

Most project failures are obvious in hindsight. The risks were always there. They just never made it into a kickoff doc, a roadmap, or a Slack thread.

This prompt creates the same psychological safety and rigor as a great pre-mortem session, without the overhead. No scheduling. No facilitation. No groupthink. No hour-long anxiety spirals.

It gives you brutally honest answers early, when fixing things is still cheap.