Contributed by Lisa Larson-Kelley, President & CEO
A pre-mortem is a planning exercise that prompts your team to assume the plan has already failed, then work backward to explain why. Run this exercise on your annual marketing plan before you lock it in, with the people who will actually do the work, and you'll surface the risks while there's still time to fix them. At Quantious, we call our version Friction Mapping (Part of our Launch Alignment Toolkit), and a full session takes 60 to 90 minutes.
What is a pre-mortem?
A pre-mortem is a structured risk exercise that you run at the start of a project. You have your team imagine that the project has failed and write down the reasons why. This technique has been around for years—psychologist Gary Klein introduced the technique in "Performing a Project Premortem," published in Harvard Business Review back in September 2007.
The method is based on what researchers call “prospective hindsight.” In a 1989 study, Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington found that when people imagined an event had already happened, they came up with about 30% more reasons for it compared to thinking it only might happen. Asking a room full of people “what could go wrong?” and you’re typically met with hedging. Telling them that the plan has already failed, and asking them to write down why, gives people permission to say what they actually think.
How is a pre-mortem different from a post-mortem or a risk register?
A post-mortem explains a failure after the money is already spent. It’s closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted. A risk register lists the concerns a team already sees, is usually written by one person, and rarely gets looked at again once it’s shared. A pre-mortem, on the other hand, brings in the whole team's input before the plan is finalized, which is also when a risk is cheapest to fix. It's the only one of the three designed to surface the risks people are reluctant to raise. Let’s face it, no one wants to be the “Debbie Downer” when trying to get hyped up for a big initiative, so they often stay quiet.
Why should marketing teams run a pre-mortem on the annual plan?
The annual marketing plan is where a pre-mortem pays off most, because it holds the year's biggest bets and its most tangled cross-functional dependencies. Your pipeline target assumes Product ships on time. Your launch calendar assumes Sales is enabled with the right materials and training before the campaigns go live. Your content rollout assumes someone actually owns the website updates. Each of those is a reasonable assumption, and each is a place where the plan can go sideways.
Pre-mortem exercises are valuable because they take the time to consider what risks may lead to the plan’s failure. Planning meetings, on the other hand, reward confidence. For years, my leadership team left our annual planning offsite energized and aligned on everything. Then, sometime around March, a problem would crop up that most of us had already suspected back in November. Nobody had said it out loud because nobody wanted to be the one deflating the energy.
When we ran a pre-mortem on our own plan for 2027, the biggest risk turned out to be coming from inside the house: whether our team's skills matched the main new offering we were betting on. That's an uncomfortable thing to say about your own team, and exactly the kind of thing a normal planning meeting glides past. Naming it moved skills development to the top of our priorities list for the current quarter, so now we’ll be ready to hit the ground running in January.
What is Friction Mapping?
Friction Mapping is Quantious's pre-mortem worksheet. It walks a cross-functional team through six focus areas from our Beyond Limits framework, poses a failure scenario for each, and turns what surfaces into prioritized risks with named owners. We originally built it for product launches, but it can also be used to pre-mortem an annual plan (see the prompts below).
Friction Mapping is a companion to our Beyond Limits Assessment. The assessment is a broad diagnostic you can take on your own to identify where your marketing organization has systemic gaps. Friction Mapping is narrower and collaborative: it asks stakeholders where this specific plan could break, while there's still time to fix it.
Who should be in a pre-mortem?
Invite the people who will manage the project and execute the work, not just the people who approve it. Leaders tend to see the plan as it was designed—the people executing it can see where it will hit snags.
Desiree Motamedi, SVP and Chief Product Marketing Officer at Salesforce, names three groups she brings into messaging work: customers, Sales, and product leadership. Those are good voices for a pre-mortem too. Sales, she notes, is “the first to tell you why the messaging won't work.” Bring someone from Sales who has talked to customers recently, someone from Product, and have Product Marketing pull it all together. Include Customer Success if the plan affects existing customers. For an annual plan, be sure to include whoever controls budget and headcount, since so many of a plan's constraints are dependent on resourcing.
How do you run a pre-mortem on a marketing plan?
A Friction Mapping session runs in four steps and takes 60 to 90 minutes.
Frame the plan (5 to 15 minutes). Before anyone imagines failure, make sure you all agree on what you're planning: review the scope, primary audience, the core problem you’re solving for customers, the one metric that will tell you whether the plan worked, the cross-functional owners, and known constraints (like budget and headcount). If people aren’t aligned on these, that disagreement is your first friction point.
Run the pre-mortem (45 to 60 minutes). Work through the six focus areas (Discover, Clarify, Align, Integrate, Deliver, Amplify) in order. For each, read the failure prompt aloud, then have everyone silently write down two or three ways the plan could fail before anyone speaks. Writing first matters. It surfaces dissenting views that open brainstorming suppresses, and it keeps the most senior person in the room from setting the agenda.
Triage (10 minutes). Give each friction item a severity tier (Critical, Watch, or Monitor) and an owner. Critical items go into the plan as risks with mitigations.
Recur (ongoing). Revisit open items at each milestone. Friction is a moving target, so something you logged as minor at kickoff can become critical halfway through.
If a full session is not feasible, you can run a lean version of a Friction Map in 20 minutes. Start with three questions:
What happened?
Which dependency did we assume would be handled that wasn't?
What decisions needed to be made but weren't assigned to anyone?
This quick version gets the conversation started, and the six focus areas help to make sure you've looked everywhere.
A deeper dive into the six focus areas of a Friction Mapping pre-mortem
The six focus areas of the Beyond Limits framework span across three phases: Process (Discover and Clarify), Strategy (Align and Integrate), and Execution (Deliver and Amplify). Each comes with some failure ‘thought starters’, adapted here for an annual plan, and cover failure patterns we see most often across enterprise marketing teams.
Discover: Were we wrong about the customer or the market?
Prompt: It's next December. The plan fell flat because we built it on assumptions about our customers or market that turned out to be wrong. What were we wrong about?
Common failures:
personas that haven't been refreshed in a year or more
messaging built inside-out from product features instead of outside-in from customer needs
skipping win/loss analysis
assuming your champion is the buyer.
Clarify: Did we agree on what success means?
Prompt: It's the year-end review, and we can't agree on whether the plan worked, because we never agreed on what success would look like. What should we have nailed down at the start?
Common failures:
include vanity metrics chosen because they're easy to count
no baseline established before the year began
success criteria defined after the fact to fit whatever happened.
Align: Are our teams telling the same story?
Prompt: It's midyear. Sales, Marketing, and the website are telling subtly different stories, and customers are confused. Where did alignment break?
Common failures:
no single source of truth for positioning
cross-functional partners left out of planning
incentives pointed at different outcomes (e.g. Sales measured on revenue, demand gen on MQLs, and Product on adoption).
Integrate: Did the strategy reach the people doing the work?
Prompt: The plan is approved and the campaigns are live, but the field still isn't using any of it. What broke between strategy and execution?
Common failures:
beautiful messaging guides sitting in a shared folder nobody opens
one-time training with no reinforcement
no feedback loop from the field back to marketing.
Deliver: Were we actually ready?
Prompt: A major launch went out on schedule, and our go-to-market team wasn't ready for it. What did we underestimate?
Common failures:
product shipping before enablement and customer proof are ready
treating every initiative as a big launch until the team is exhausted
having no contingency plan when deadlines are missed.
Amplify: Did we learn anything?
Prompt: It's next November, and we're making the same planning mistakes because we never captured what we learned this year. What did we forget to measure, document, or share?
Common failures:
no retrospective on the calendar
measuring activity like assets shipped instead of impact like pipeline and win rate
knee-jerk messaging changes before the market has had time to react to the first version.
How do you prioritize what a pre-mortem surfaces?
Sort every friction item into one of three severity tiers (Critical, Watch, and Monitor). Give every Critical and Watch item a named owner.
| Tier | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Likely to break the plan if not addressed | Build the mitigation into the plan now, assign an owner with the authority to fix it, and re-check at every milestone |
| Watch | Could become critical under pressure or a scope change | Assign an owner, set what trigger would make this Critical, and check in weekly or at each milestone |
| Monitor | A real risk, but unlikely or contained | Log it, don't act unless it escalates, and re-evaluate at the retro |
Look across the six focus areas for patterns. If you have Critical items in both Discover and Align, you probably have one upstream root cause rather than a handful of independent risks, and fixing the root is always cheaper than chasing each symptom.
How often should you revisit a pre-mortem?
Revisit it at every major milestone with a 15-minute check-in. For an annual plan, quarterly planning sessions are a natural place to do it. Three questions are usually enough:
What has escalated since we last looked?
What has been resolved?
What's new that we couldn't see when we started?
New competitive moves, reorgs, scope changes, and customer signals are the usual answers to that last one.
What mistakes make a pre-mortem fail?
The most common mistake is running a pre-mortem with only the people who approved the plan, and leaving out key stakeholders, like the people executing it. This guarantees you'll only hear the risks leadership already knows about. The second most common error is skipping the silent writing step, so the first confident voice in the meeting sets the agenda for everyone else. The third is generating a long list of risks but not assigning any of them to one person, which feels productive but changes nothing. The fourth is filing the list away and never looking at it again until the retro.
Get started with your pre-mortem
A pre-mortem asks your team to assume the plan has already failed and explain why. Run it before kickoff, with the people who will do the work, in a 60 to 90 minute session. Have everyone write before anyone talks, work through all six focus areas, put a named owner on every Critical item, and revisit the list each quarter.
Some of what surfaces will be uncomfortable, and some of it may point at you or your team. But, believe me, it's a lot easier to have that conversation during the planning stage, than in March when it’s too late.
Download the Friction Mapping Tool, or take the Beyond Limits Assessment at beyond.quantious.com. If your pre-mortem turns up something ugly, get in touch. The Quantious team has years of experience solving complicated problems so our clients can have smooth, successful launches.
