Home / vandanaajaydubey111 / great-pm · GitHub

pre-mortem SKILL.md skillA

pre-mortem from vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.

Install it, pinned

mdr add vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/pre-mortem@git:20260721.86de099

Pins git:20260721.86de099 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.

Audit grade: A, 17 of 17 checks passed
Kind: SKILL.md skill
Repository: vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm
Path: skills/pre-mortem/SKILL.md
Versions recorded: 1
Latest version: git:20260721.86de099, committed Jul 21, 2026
Size: 8,494 bytes
Repository stars: 3
License: MIT

Imagine the initiative has already shipped and failed publicly — work backwards from the failure to identify the most likely product / PM causes BEFORE building. Forces concrete risk identification, not vague "what could go wrong" lists. Adapted from Gary Klein's MIT Sloan research; pairs with engineering's engineering-side pre-mortem.

Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.

What the file says

# Pre-mortem — fail-it-before-you-build-it

A retrospective for a product / initiative that hasn't happened yet.
Surfaces real risks that "list every risk" prompts miss.

Originated in Gary Klein's research at MIT Sloan; standard now at AWS,
SpaceX, and ops-mature product teams. great-pm's PM-side version focuses
on product / launch / trust failures — not the engineering side
(which engineering's pre-mortem covers).

## The 5-step pre-mortem

### Step 1. Imagine you're 6 months in the future

The initiative shipped. It is a clear, public, painful failure. There's
a TechCrunch story. Users are tweeting screenshots. The team is in damage
control. Your investor / board is asking what went wrong.

### Step 2. Write the post-mortem headline

ONE sentence. Concrete. Specific. Name the failure mode by what it did
to users.

- ❌ Bad: "Adoption was lower than expected."
- ❌ Bad: "AI didn't work as well as we hoped."
- ✅ Good: "On 2026-09-14, Acme's categorizer mis-bucketed 18% of
  Tamil-language merchants as 'Other', and the support backlog grew to
  6,400 tickets before the bug was identified."
- ✅ Good: "By Q3 we'd lost the top 8 creators to a competitor offering
…

Read the whole file at its exact version.

How to install

The exact contents, by fingerprint

mdr add vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/pre-mortem@sha256:d602bf8b9a2bcecc

The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260721.86de099, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.

Badge

[![mdr](https://markdownregistry.com/badge/art_uq34cppi7pqsvvf5.svg)](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_uq34cppi7pqsvvf5)

2 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.

Versions

The registry has recorded 1 version of this file, committed on Jul 21, 2026.

version	committed	commit	size	audit
git:20260721.86de099 latest	2026-07-21	86de099	8,494 B	A	view

Audit of the latest version

A 17 of 17 checks passed. Fixed automatic checks with no AI involved, so the same checks give the same answer every run.

pass: Frontmatter block present
pass: Frontmatter declares a name
pass: Frontmatter declares a description
pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (8494 bytes)
pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
pass: No credential-shaped string
pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
pass: No text hidden with inline styles
pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
pass: No link to a raw IP address
pass: No script tag

Source

GitHub

vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm · 3 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-09-20 · branch main

API

GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_uq34cppi7pqsvvf5
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/pre-mortem
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/d602bf8b9a2bcecc10feb4c2f98825d6a9860f2b54a8222c683682f1d6d98d34

Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.

Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.

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