War-game an acquisition integration before employees, customers, and finance treat a soft Day One plan as the official operating system.
Integration plans fail when culture promises outrun staffing, when product roadmaps collide without an owner, when customer messaging lags the rumor mill, and when synergy math depends on cuts nobody has named. A colorful timeline is not evidence that two companies can operate as one without attrition and churn.
Freeze the scenario
State what closes, what stays separate for ninety days, who owns each workstream, the customer promise that does not change, and the success metric after the first quarter. Name systems, brands, and teams that feel the change first. If the memo mixes valuation thesis, cultural narrative, and a product merge, split them. A war game needs one move under fire at a time.
Write the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new. Also write the kill criteria: the attrition spike, customer churn threshold, or systems miss that would force a hold within a stated window.
Seats that matter
- People lead. Role clarity, retention risk, and the message that feels unfair on first read.
- Product and engineering. Roadmap collisions, platform debt, and who owns the merged backlog.
- Finance. Synergy timing, cost that is fixed when you hoped it was variable, and cash surprises.
- Customer success. Support load, contract promises, and the account that will escalate first.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Attach the same source pack to every seat: org charts, contract summaries, product maps, retention history, and the Day One FAQ you actually intend to send. Secret data for one seat creates fake agreement.
Loop the review
Feed Pingpong the integration memo, workstream owners, and seating briefs. First pass steelmans the plan. Later passes attack from people, product, finance, and customer seats. Final pass turns surviving objections into tests, mitigations, or a changed recommendation. Agreement across passes is not proof. Keep the objections that still have evidence gaps.
If synergy savings are the real risk, force finance and people seats to name the roles, vendors, and tools that disappear, with owners and dates. Synergy that only appears as a percentage in a slide is not a plan. Write the cuts, the customer impact, and the communication sequence into the package, then ask those seats to attack them.
Force a week-two narrative: what happens if a key engineer leaves, if a top account threatens to churn, or if systems dual-run longer than budgeted. If those stories are stronger than your mitigation plan, fix the package before close. Pair with stress-test an M&A thesis, war-game a reorg, war-game an all-hands message, pretend you are the CFO, and the war-game decisions hub. See how to run a Pingpong.