How I killed Mailcloud’s 21,000 users today
I dont want to take away from the good thoughts in this article but it annoys me when people create terms for something that already exists. A "pre-mortem" as described here is just a "Risk Assessment", outside the startup world its typically a must have part of any project.
Donning my pre-mortem cap: perhaps they pre-died because it's impossible to figure out what mailcloud actually does.
So, we imagined we have shipped our closed BETA version of Mailcloud, and nobody wants it. Worse than that, it doesn’t even work, reviews are terrible and generally the whole world hates us – signified in a homepage Techcrunch piece because our product was so bad.
Problem is, your failure is not likely going to be that dramatic. The product will likely work, have some users who like it and some positive or at least not terrible reviews, but will just never take off. Might not be a clear reason why, you just didn't "hit it."
good thoughts but I think a much better version of this is the Dangers Strengths Opportunities exercise (e.g. http://robdkelly.com/blog/getting-things-done/dos-exercise/)
The danger part is effectively the same with the added bonus of being able to convert all Dangers into Opportunities. Once you do that, you've gotten the entire team to agree that, to achieve success, all they need to do is accomplish the Opportunities.
What exactly is 'mailcloud'? I am assuming it's a email hosting company plus they added 'cloud' to the mix.
It would have been good to see some examples, not just the concept.