with the skill
## Pre-Mortem Analysis: Rivertown Meal-Kit Delivery
**Failure scenario:** It’s late November. The launch attracted customers, but orders arrived late—or not at all. Cold-storage disruptions threatened food safety, refunds erased promotional revenue, and first-time customers didn’t return.
**The clearest risk is already measurable: you have delivery capacity for only 65% of forecast demand.** Resolve that before the radio campaign starts on November 9.
### Tigers (Real Risks)
| Risk | Urgency | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| **Delivery capacity falls short by 380 orders daily** | **Launch-Blocking** | Forty drivers × 18 deliveries = **720 deliveries/day**, against 1,100 forecast orders. You need at least **62 drivers** just to meet forecast, with almost no buffer for absence, traffic, or failed deliveries. |
| **Frostline is a single point of failure** | **Launch-Blocking** | An outage, temperature excursion, or capacity shortfall could leave you unable to store or dispatch food safely. No fallback is arranged. |
| **The promotion creates demand you cannot fulfill** | **Launch-Blocking** | Radio advertising begins a week before launch. The 50% discount may increase demand beyond forecast, while advertising cannot be withdrawn instantly. Uncapped orders could turn a capacity problem into a reputational crisis. |
| **Forecast delivery productivity may not hold in practice** | **Launch-Blocking: validate assumption** | “About 18 deliveries” may exclude loading, breaks, difficult addresses, route distances, and launch-day confusion. Even your current 720/day estimate may be optimistic. |
| **Exceptions overwhelm customer support** | **Fast-Follow; minimum readiness before launch** | Late deliveries, substitutions, refunds, and missing boxes could generate concentrated support demand. Have basic resolution procedures ready before launch; expand staffing against observed volume. |
### Paper Tigers (Overblown Concerns)
- **“We must serve every Rivertown
Show the rest (25 more lines)
neighborhood on day one.”** A smaller delivery area with reliable service is safer than broad coverage with predictable failures.
- **“We need an expensive, fully duplicated cold-storage operation.”** Not necessarily. You need a credible, tested contingency—potentially reserved emergency capacity or qualified refrigerated transport—not necessarily a second permanent facility.
- **“A sellout means the launch failed.”** Transparent order limits and a waitlist are preferable to taking payment for boxes you cannot reliably deliver.
### Elephants (Unspoken Worries)
- **Does the discounted first box make economic sense?** Calculate contribution after ingredients, packaging, storage, delivery, marketing, and likely refunds. Model how many full-price repeat purchases recover acquisition costs.
- **Is 1,100 orders/day a promotion-adjusted forecast?** Establish whether it includes radio-driven demand, and model a higher-demand case.
- **Has the whole cold chain been validated?** Storage is only one link. Verify packing, loading, transit time, doorstep exposure, temperature monitoring, and rejection procedures.
- **Are food-safety and operational approvals complete?** Confirm applicable permits, supplier controls, allergen labeling, and recall readiness. Missing required approvals would become launch blockers.
### Action Plans for Launch-Blocking Tigers
*Proposed deadlines below work backward from November 16; no launch year was supplied.*
| Risk | Mitigation and decision criterion | Owner | Due date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery shortfall | Secure additional qualified drivers or contracted capacity, or cap daily orders. **62 drivers is the mathematical minimum; approximately 72 would support 1,100 orders at 85% of nominal capacity.** Validate the buffer operationally. | Delivery Operations lead | **Nov 8**, before radio begins |
| Frostline dependency | Confirm contracted capacity and operating hours; arrange qualified fallback storage/transport. Document transfer triggers, response times, and safe product-disposal rules. | Supply Chain + Food Safety leads | **Nov 8** |
| Uncontrolled promotional demand | Enforce checkout limits by date and delivery area. Add a waitlist and clear availability terms. Align radio messaging with actual capacity; defer or reduce advertising if readiness is insufficient. | Marketing + Product + Operations | **Nov 8** |
| Unproven delivery rate | Run representative timed routes, including loading and handoff. Set order caps using demonstrated throughput and safe transit limits—not the hiring plan alone. | Delivery Operations + Food Safety | **Nov 6**; final rehearsal **Nov 13** |
**Launch recommendation:** Do not accept 1,100 daily orders on the current plan. Before November 9, either secure and validate more capacity or explicitly limit demand. Hold a final go/no-go review on November 13.
*Suggested Markdown filename: `PreMortem-Rivertown-Meal-Kit-[date].md`. I can provide the document here, but cannot save a file from this chat.*