

How I killed Mailcloud’s 21,000 users today - taigeair
http://malcolmbell.net/2014/04/29/how-i-killed-mailclouds-21000-users-today/

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verelo
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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_assessment](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_assessment)

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ghshephard
I disagree, Risk Assessment is the process of assessing what could go wrong.
In the Pre-Mortem, you take a different approach, and take, as a _given_ that
the project has failed, so now you are not discussing what _could_ go wrong,
but what _did_ go wrong.

It's a subtle, but important distinction. As the article notes, that once you
have an image in your mind of a failed project, you come up with a somewhat
different analysis than if you are trying to picture what could wrong.

I frequently see attitudes in risk-assessment, particularly in those that have
planning responsibilities, where people actually get quite defensive when
people are pointing out the risks in the project, to the point at which others
in the room no longer wish to participate. On the flip side, if we are
presupposing things went really wrong, and everything failed - it almost
becomes a game to figure out what went wrong.

I'll take it one step further - at a tactical level, when my
engineers/technicians are preparing for a complex change in our IT
environments, and they do their walkthrough, and demonstrate the change is
guaranteed to work - that is just the first, almost minor step. The second,
much more important one, is to then find at least three ways in which the
change will fail. Getting something to work might only take a few hours.
Finding out how the change will fail may take several days, or even weeks -
but it's much more informative and useful to the change control procedure than
demonstrating something will work, and I find the mindset of "accepting and
looking for failure, rather than resisting it" is the key.

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amscanne
Donning my pre-mortem cap: perhaps they pre-died because it's impossible to
figure out what mailcloud actually _does_.

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grrowl
Yeah... maybe the new homepage increased conversions when they removed any
semblance of information from the page? The only two options now are, "I have
no idea what this is, but I'm curious"; and "I don't give my email address to
randoms"

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ams6110
_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."

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bigchewy
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/](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.

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wzy
What exactly is 'mailcloud'? I am assuming it's a email hosting company plus
they added 'cloud' to the mix.

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taigeair
It was featured on product hunt -> www.mailcloud.com/story

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taigeair
It would have been good to see some examples, not just the concept.

