MODULE 01 · FDE ACADEMY
Understand the customer
Almost every AI deployment that disappoints was scoped from a sentence. Someone said “we want AI for our contracts”, a tool was chosen, and nobody watched a contract being reviewed. The work in this module is unglamorous and it is where the decisions with the longest shadow are made.
- Lessons
- 4
- Module
- 01 of 5
A forward-deployed engineer is not a consultant who writes a strategy and leaves. The point of being inside the business is that you can see the process rather than a description of it — the export nobody mentions, the spreadsheet that is the real system of record, the approval that takes four days because one person is on leave.
By the end of this module you should be able to take one vague request and return a written scope that names a single deployable slice, the constraints it must respect, and the things you have deliberately excluded.
- Covers
- workflow observationproblem decompositionconstraintsscoping
Free and self-paced. No certification is offered.
Lessons
4 lessons
Each one ends with a task carried out somewhere on this site.
- 01Watch the work before you name the problemHow to run an observation session, what to record while you are in the room, and why the process description you were sent is usually a description of the process people believe they follow.Roughly two hours in the room, plus an hour to write it up. Estimate only.change-management5 steps
- 02Cut the work until one part is deployableA workflow is not an AI problem. Some steps in it are. This lesson separates retrieval from extraction from drafting from judgement, and finds the smallest slice that can be finished and measured.About ninety minutes with the record from lesson 01 in front of you.ragllm-evaluation5 steps
- 03Constraints are the designWhere the data may go, who may see it, what must be kept or deleted, and what it may cost. Four answers that decide the architecture before a single tool is chosen.About an hour, most of it spent finding who is allowed to answer.compliance-governancechange-management5 steps
- 04Scope one thing, in writingA scope that names what will not be delivered is worth more than one that lists features. This lesson uses the Sprint’s day-two decision document as the template.About two hours to write, and one meeting to agree it.change-managementcompliance-governance5 steps