Society Man

Benefits of a Pre-Mortem

Today I had the pleasure of seeing a panel discussion on the launch of StyleFind.com - a shopping site created and curated by InStyle editors. It was orginally the site StyleFeeder.com (original site is still up) but was acquired and re-branded as StyleFind. This is an attempt by InStyle to claim their original branded content positioning as more and more brands are heading in this direction, as well as take advantage of the e-commerce potential.

One interesting take-away from the panel was a comment from the moderator, Martha Nelson, Editorial Director of Time Inc. which was a "Pre-Mortem" exercise that she implemented at the beginning of the project. It involved imagining and visualizing that the launch was unsuccessful and discussing what were the mistakes that led them to their demise. This allows the team to exorcise their fears and worries about what might go wrong and it identified 16 potential pitfalls that they should be mindful to avoid. She then assigned each issue to a member of the team so that they could monitor them throughout the process. Thought it was a very positive, proactive way of handling the negative.