Inside the app

Risks

The risk register — what could kill this, ranked and tracked to closure.

Every product workspace has a risk register: the place where the quiet knowledge that something is wrong becomes a tracked, decidable item.

Anatomy of a risk

  • Category — market, platform/API, technical, distribution, financial, support, compliance, founder dependency, competition, other
  • Description — the risk as a sentence ("the workflow breaks if the marketplace API changes its terms")
  • Likelihood and impact — LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH each
  • Mitigation — what you're doing about it
  • Status — OPEN, MITIGATED, ACCEPTED, CLOSED

The risk register: likelihood, impact, mitigation, and status per risk The risk register — the banner counts the unmitigated high-likelihood or high-impact risks that block scaling decisions.

How the rest of the app reads it

  • The Overview surfaces the highest unmitigated risk, and the dashboard's Needs Attention list flags HIGH risks on active products.
  • Stage gates and reviews treat an unmitigated HIGH risk as a reason to pause advancement, not a footnote.
  • The founder-dependency category exists because, for solo portfolios, it's the most common way products die quietly.

The habit

Write risks down before they're urgent. A risk register you update when you're calm is what makes a portfolio review fast: you're deciding, not discovering.