Imagine your project has already failed. Work backward to figure out why – and prevent it now.

Prompt

I am about to:
[DESCRIBE YOUR DECISION, PROJECT, OR INITIATIVE]

Perform a Pre-Mortem: It is one year from now and this has failed
spectacularly.

1. What are the 6 most likely reasons it failed?
2. For each, what early warning signs should I watch for?
3. Rank them by likelihood AND severity
4. For the top 3, what specific action can I take NOW to prevent them?
5. What is the one failure mode I'm almost certainly not thinking about?

Example

Input:

I am about to launch a SaaS product with a team of 3, bootstrapped,
targeting small marketing agencies.

Output (abbreviated):

1. Ran out of money before finding product-market fit
   Warning signs: Low trial-to-paid conversion after month 2,
   customer calls revealing "nice to have" not "must have" sentiment
   Likelihood: High | Severity: Critical

2. Built features nobody asked for instead of selling
   Warning signs: Sprint boards full of ideas, empty CRM pipeline,
   more GitHub commits than customer conversations
   Likelihood: High | Severity: High

...

The one you're not thinking about: Your team of 3 has an unspoken
disagreement about what success looks like. One person wants VC scale,
another wants lifestyle business. This will fracture every decision
by month 6.