Week 1 · FDE Mindset & Toolkit · about 3 minutes
What you will be able to do
Open a customer conversation when there is no spec, and leave with a workflow, an owner, and the cost of a wrong answer.
The idea
Most of an FDE's job is engineering you already know. The new part is working without a spec, inside someone else's cloud, on a workflow you did not design. Model choice, RAG, and agent graphs come after that sentence is true.
Ask where it hurts, then pin three facts before you offer a build: which workflow breaks, who owns it, and what a wrong answer costs. A chatbot request with none of those is a demo, not a deployment.
1. Which workflow breaks, and how often?
2. Who owns the outcome when it breaks?
3. What does a wrong answer cost — time, money, or risk?
4. What is the system of record?
5. What does done look like in two weeks, not two years?If you cannot name the owner and the cost, you are still in the pitch. Do not open the editor.
Key takeaways
- No spec is the normal case, not a blocker.
- Leave with workflow, owner, and cost of a wrong answer.
- Do not pick a model until those three are named.
Part of the Forward Deployed Engineer roadmap. New to the role? Start with what a Forward Deployed Engineer does.