alexe-ev Plan Risk Mitigation
Purpose
Help teams identify, assess, and develop mitigation plans for risks that could affect a product initiative's success.
Skill type
Conceptual skill
Use this skill when
- A product initiative has identifiable risks that need to be managed
- A launch or experiment is approaching and risk planning is missing
- A stakeholder review requires risk documentation
- An audit of risk coverage across a product area is needed
Do not use this skill when
- The goal is privacy/security risk specifically (use assess-privacy-security-regulatory)
- The goal is ethical risk (use apply-ethical-decision-framework)
Required inputs
- Product initiative or decision being assessed
- Context about the initiative (scope, timeline, dependencies)
Optional inputs
- Known risks or concerns
- Stakeholder inputs
- Prior initiative post-mortems
- Technical or business constraints
Upstream context
Works best when:
- Initiative scope is defined
- Privacy, security, and ethical assessments have been done
Downstream handoff
Output can feed:
- plan-delivery-collaboration (risks feed into delivery planning)
- plan-product-launch (launch risks need mitigation plans)
Instructions
- Identify all risk categories: technical, market, execution, legal/compliance, ethical, organizational.
- For each risk: describe, assess likelihood and impact, and classify severity.
- Define the trigger: what event indicates the risk is materializing?
- Define the mitigation strategy (reduce, accept, transfer, avoid).
- Assign an owner for each risk.
- Define the contingency plan if mitigation fails.
Output
Provide:
- Risk inventory by category
- Risk register: risk / likelihood / impact / severity / trigger / mitigation / owner / contingency
- Priority risk list (highest severity first)
- Monitoring plan (how risks are tracked over time)
- Escalation triggers
Risks / caveats
- Risk planning that produces a document no one reads is theater
- Assign real owners — shared ownership means no ownership
- Risk severity must combine both likelihood and impact — don't overweight low-probability disasters