What Playing Minesweeper As A Kid Taught Me About Risk Management

Engineering leaders often react to incidents after they happen, but hidden risks linger in code, config and processes. The article reframes those risks as "mines" and introduces a lightweight framework that makes each risk visible, categorises its impact, likelihood and defusal effort, and stores it as a tracked ticket. By treating risk like a Minesweeper board you can see numbers around hidden threats and decide where to flag or defuse before a blowout occurs. The framework defines a set of fields - type, explosion impact, blast radius, likelihood, detection confidence, countdown timer, effort and urgency - and shows how to capture them in a Jira ticket or any task system. Real examples include a free-tier third-party tool about to expire, a rapidly growing data table that will choke at higher volume, and a single engineer's exclusive knowledge of a backend flow. Regular ceremonies - weekly solo sweeps, monthly detection check-ins and quarterly strategic defusal - keep the board current and embed risk hunting into existing rituals. For technical leaders the payoff is concrete: fewer firefighting incidents, clearer prioritisation of technical debt, and a culture where risk is surfaced early rather than discovered in production. The framework gives managers a shared language to discuss hidden fragilities, align them with roadmap planning, and ultimately improve team performance and delivery confidence.