Post Mortems Retrospectives

# Post-mortems & Retrospectives - All Guest Insights

*11 guests, 13 mentions*

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## Annie Duke
*Annie Duke*

> "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."

**Insight:** A pre-mortem is only effective if it results in 'kill criteria'—pre-determined signals that will trigger a pivot or shutdown.

**Tactical advice:**
- Identify early signals that a project is failing during the pre-mortem.
- Pre-commit to specific actions (like killing the project) if those signals are met.

*Timestamp: 00:00:28*

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> "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."

**Insight:** Pre-mortems counteract the 'sunk cost' bias by establishing objective exit points before emotional attachment to a project grows.

**Tactical advice:**
- Ask the team: 'Imagine it is six months from now and the project has failed. What were the early signals?'
- Create a list of 'kill criteria' based on these signals (e.g., inability to get a decision-maker in the room).

*Timestamp: 01:06:18*


## Ben Williams
*Ben Williams*

> "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."

**Insight:** Institutionalizing a 'learnings review' ceremony ensures that experiment data is actually leveraged for future decisions.

**Tactical advice:**
- Hold weekly 'Impact and Learnings' reviews focused on insights rather than status updates
- Socialize learnings across the entire company to uplevel other teams

*Timestamp: 01:07:00*


## Carole Robin
*Carole Robin*

> "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?"

**Insight:** Reframing failure as a learning opportunity is essential for long-term growth and resilience.

**Tactical advice:**
- When a failure occurs, immediately ask: 'What is the lesson here?'
- Use the AFOG acronym to maintain perspective during painful setbacks.

*Timestamp: 01:17:02*


## Christina Wodtke
*Christina Wodtke*

> "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."

**Insight:** The value of grading OKRs lies in the retrospective analysis of why a goal was or wasn't hit, not the number itself.

**Tactical advice:**
- Prioritize the 'why' behind the grade over the precision of the numerical score.
- Use the end-of-quarter retrospective to identify systemic blockers that prevented hitting 100%.

*Timestamp: 00:53:20*


## Eeke de Milliano
*Eeke de Milliano*

> "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.'"

**Insight:** Reframing post-mortems as retrospectives helps normalize failure and focuses the team on learning rather than blame.

**Tactical advice:**
- Rename 'post-mortems' to 'retrospectives'
- Shine a light on failure to mitigate the fear of taking big swings

*Timestamp: 00:22:14*

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> "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.' An