The ritual most senior engineers skip
Everyone in this field has heard the word "pre-mortem." Almost nobody runs one as an actual habit.
The people who do ship cleaner work. The cost is small: about 10 minutes to generate the failure list, 25 to 30 for the whole ritual. What it buys you is avoiding the moment on a post-incident call where someone says "yeah, we knew this could happen and shipped anyway." Plenty of Sev-1s aren't preventable. For the ones that are, this is the cheapest way I know to catch them early.
What follows is the version I actually use: the mental flip that makes it work, the 10-minute structure, the three ways you can respond to each risk, and the cases where running a pre-mortem is just procrastination wearing a lab coat.
One thing to hold onto if you skip the rest: the useful work happens in past tense, before the incident, in concrete sentences.
