In Product Management and in software development, there is a concept called pre-mortem. As opposed to a post-mortem, where one tries to analyze what caused a failure (or death) to occur to a feature or an idea, a pre-mortem entails envisioning the possible ways an idea or a feature could fail (or die) before even we begin to build it.

The exercise is done to ensure that we take all such potential failure scenarios into account while designing and building a feature.

The pre-mortem can be applied to any decision that we are about to make. After all, every decision that we make have certain consequences.

If we are able to envision all the ways in which the decision could turn up unfavourable consequences, we can then outline the things we need to take into account while making the decision and put in contingencies where necessary.