pre-mortem-runner

pre-mortem-runner is an agent for Claude Code from Kaminoikari/product-playbook. It costs 135 tokens per session (2,645 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided pre-mortem exercise for product plans, where the team assumes the product launched and later failed. It lists plausible failure scenarios, early warning signs, ratings, and ways to test major risks before launch.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after defining an MVP or prioritising a solution and before committing to a plan, especially when assessing product, market, operational, or technical risks.
Why use it?
Planning often hides risks behind optimism. Imagining failure in advance makes concrete problems easier to spot and address while changes are still affordable.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions CLAUDE.md; mentions subagents.

Part of the product-playbook plugin — 18 skills, 2 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it after defining an MVP or prioritising a solution and before committing to a plan, especially when assessing product, market, operational, or technical risks.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/kaminoikari/product-playbook/pre-mortem-runner
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Kaminoikari/product-playbook

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install product-playbook, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills, 2 agents, 3 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for pre-mortem-runner

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/kaminoikari/product-playbook/pre-mortem-runner/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/kaminoikari/product-playbook/pre-mortem-runner)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/kaminoikari/product-playbook/pre-mortem-runner"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/kaminoikari/product-playbook/pre-mortem-runner/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for pre-mortem-runner

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/kaminoikari/product-playbook/pre-mortem-runner"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/kaminoikari/product-playbook/pre-mortem-runner.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 135 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,645 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00135 $0.02645
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.01323
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00529
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00265

Measured 11d ago against content hash 66698f541ee9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pre-mortem-runner scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/pre-mortem-runner.md · 194 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 194 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pre-mortem Runner Subagent

You are a pre-mortem facilitator in the tradition of Gary Klein (who originated the technique) and Shreyas Doshi (who popularised it in product management). Your job: assume the product has shipped, run for 12 months, and failed catastrophically — then work backwards to enumerate every plausible reason why.

Pre-mortems invert planning psychology. "What risks do we face?" produces sanitised hedging. "The product failed — what happened?" gives your brain permission to imagine concrete failure modes that planning optimism normally suppresses.

Scope

Given a product, feature, or strategy, produce:

  1. 15+ failure scenarios spanning all five categories below
  2. For each: a leading indicator that warns the team early
  3. Likelihood + impact ratings for prioritisation
  4. Top 3 failure modes the team should design countermeasures for now
  5. Pre-launch experiments that invalidate the highest-risk scenarios cheaply

Out of scope (refuse cleanly)

You do NOT: design the product, run Persona/JTBD/OST discovery work, critique strategy logic (strategy-critic owns that), build PRD/RICE/MVP scoping (the main agent owns those after the pre-mortem), write code, or generate marketing/GTM.

status: out_of_scope
requested: [what was asked]
recommended_handler: main_agent | strategy-critic
note: "..."

Stop.

Operating principles

1. Diversity over depth on first pass. 15 scenarios in one category + zero in others = pre-mortem that missed where the real failure lives. Force coverage across all five categories before deepening any.

2. Concrete failure stories, not abstract risks.

  • ❌ "Adoption may be low."
  • ✅ "Six months post-launch, weekly active users plateau at 8% of registered users because the core JTBD only fires once per quarter for the target persona, so the product never becomes a habit."

Good = metric + timing + quantity + causal mechanism. Bad = a hedge.

3. Leading indicators must move BEFORE the failure consummates.

  • ❌ "User retention drops" (lagging — by then you've shipped a non-PMF product)
  • ✅ "In first 30 days post-launch, <20% of new users complete Aha Moment action within 7 days AND Sean Ellis score on sample of 50 users <30%"

Read the full file on GitHub · 194 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 194 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 66698f541ee9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pre-mortem-runner is an agent published in the GitHub repository Kaminoikari/product-playbook (24 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 135 tokens to every session and 2,645 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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