Post-mortems & Retrospectives

"So a pre-mortem, it's great only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals."

"What a pre-mortem allows you to do is to set up kill criteria. So kill criteria are just a set of signals that you might see that would tell you that it's time to pivot or stop because once we actually launch something, we're very, very slow to decide to quit."

"We have these team level impact and learnings reviews... The teams continuously document any learnings from data exploration, from experimentation, from user research and so on. They document that in their weekly impact and learnings document... Most of it is spent discussing learnings that have been documented, their implications, how they can be leveraged in follow up work."

"The acronym is A-F-O-G, another F-ing... Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth. Every student who ever took a class from me... knows that acronym because my question, when something has gone wrong or a person has experienced a failure, my first question is always, so what did you learn?"

"What matters is, why 80%? Really focus on the learning... It's all about the retrospectives. Make sure your grading is secondary to retrospective, is the biggest thing I would say, because that's what's going to be valuable."

"Instead of calling something a postmortem, call it a retrospective, so that it's a positive thing. Like, 'Hey, we're learning from this thing.'"

"Have people talk about the failure in these sort of public forums, where usually you talk about the successes. So have someone actually write a note that's like, 'Hey, here are all my learnings from this thing that we did.' And send it to the org."

"Retrospectives make such a big difference because they are indicative of psychological safety, which underpins so much, right? Once you start building in this psychological safety, the ability to ask questions and to start saying, 'What are we doing that's working? What are we doing that's not working? Okay, determine that something doesn't work. Are we allowed to go change it?'"

"I remember... we decided we needed to do a rewrite, red flag number one... It didn't take six months, it took two and a half years... We skipped discovery. We didn't really write a one-pager, we just went for it."

"I think the biggest message I can tell to anybody learning, is really, sit down, do a retrospective with yourself, and say, is this helping me get better at being a product manager? And if it's not, change it."

"The confluence of those three things [mobile web deterioration, lack of viral spread, remote work]... we entered I guess 2024 and said, 'Look, there is a company to be built in the space. I'm not sure where the people would've built it. This concurrent incarnation we love, but it's not growing.'"

"To me, a surprising experiment is one where the estimated result beforehand and the actual result differ by a lot. ... So we focused not just on the winners, but also surprising losers, things that people thought would be a no-brainer to run. And then for some reason, it was very negative. And sometimes, it's that negative that gives you insight."

"The idea is simple, which is when you are working on an important project or initiative, you get together with your team early on in the products or the projects' life to see in advance what could go wrong. And the way I describe a pre-mortem is that if you do a pre-mortem right, you will not have to do an ugly post-mortem."