EPISODE · May 26, 2026 · 11 MIN
Why Your Eng Team Needs a Pre-Mortem Before Every Launch
from Tech Leadership with Fexingo: Engineering Managers, CTOs, and Technical Leadership Conversations · host Fexingo
Lucas and Luna dive into the pre-mortem technique—a structured exercise where an engineering team imagines a project has failed six months in the future and reverse-engineers what went wrong. Lucas shares how a pre-mortem at his former company caught a critical scaling flaw in a new payment service before launch, saving $2 million in potential rework. Luna contrasts this with standard post-mortems and argues that pre-mortems surface hidden assumptions without blame. They discuss how top tech teams at companies like Amazon and Google have used pre-mortems to avoid catastrophic failures, and offer a practical template for running one in 45 minutes. The episode also touches on cognitive biases like overconfidence and groupthink that pre-mortems counteract. A concrete, actionable episode for engineering leaders who want to prevent failure rather than just learn from it. #TechLeadership #EngineeringManagement #PreMortem #RiskManagement #CognitiveBiases #ProjectManagement #SoftwareEngineering #CTO #EngineeringManager #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #TechStrategy #Amazon #Google #Scaling #FailureAnalysis #TeamCulture #DecisionMaking Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo
What this episode covers
Lucas and Luna dive into the pre-mortem technique—a structured exercise where an engineering team imagines a project has failed six months in the future and reverse-engineers what went wrong. Lucas shares how a pre-mortem at his former company caught a critical scaling flaw in a new payment service before launch, saving $2 million in potential rework. Luna contrasts this with standard post-mortems and argues that pre-mortems surface hidden assumptions without blame. They discuss how top tech teams at companies like Amazon and Google have used pre-mortems to avoid catastrophic failures, and offer a practical template for running one in 45 minutes. The episode also touches on cognitive biases like overconfidence and groupthink that pre-mortems counteract. A concrete, actionable episode for engineering leaders who want to prevent failure rather than just learn from it. #TechLeadership #EngineeringManagement #PreMortem #RiskManagement #CognitiveBiases #ProjectManagement #SoftwareEngineering #CTO #EngineeringManager #FexingoBusiness #BusinessPodcast #TechStrategy #Amazon #Google #Scaling #FailureAnalysis #TeamCulture #DecisionMaking Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo
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Why Your Eng Team Needs a Pre-Mortem Before Every Launch
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