The best time to run an abuse pre-mortem, the session where a team works out how a feature could be misused before it ships, is at design review.
At that point, changing a default is easy. If new accounts shouldn't be able to message strangers, or should have a lower gifting cap in their first week, it's a quick edit to the spec. Once the feature has shipped and people are using it, the same change means taking something away from users, and that's a much harder decision to get through.
Being invited that early is something T&S earns. It means being selective: full reviews for launches that let strangers contact each other, move money or items between users, expose location, or change what minors can do, and a short checklist for everything else. It also means answers that come back in days. A review that slows every release won't stay in the launch plan for long.
Some safeguards cost the feature its own metric. A gifting limit on new accounts will reduce gifting, and buy-in is difficult (revenue is king). Agreeing the exit criteria up front keeps the follow-up simple.
If a launch goes ahead with a known risk, the person who owns the product outcome signs off on it, with a date to revisit. T&S makes sure the risk is in front of them when they decide, and takes it to the exec who owns safety risk when it's too serious to be one person's call.
For the program itself, one method is to track how many incidents in a features' first 90 days the review predicted, and how many accepted risks turned into incidents. If that second number keeps climbing, risks are being accepted at too low a level.
I built a free tool for running a pre-mortem at design stage. Link in the comments.
#TrustAndSafety #SafetyByDesign #ProductManagement #GameDev