Week 1 · FDE Mindset & Toolkit · about 3 minutes
What you will be able to do
Name the five phases of a forward deployed engagement and why their order matters.
The idea
A common way to run an engagement is in five phases. Discovery: audit their data and agree the Minimum Viable Value. Landing zone: a secure network, identity and infrastructure, built as code. Integration: the Delta adapters and data pipelines.
Evaluation: prove it works with automated checks and real users. Handover: runbooks, dashboards and training so the client can run it without you.
The phases loop: a failed evaluation sends you back to integration. But skipping one doesn't save time. It moves the work to a worse moment, usually in front of the customer.
You're not done when it works. You're done when they can run it without you.
Key takeaways
- Discovery sets the MVV before any code.
- The landing zone gets approved before data moves.
- Handover is part of the job, not an afterthought.
Part of the Forward Deployed Engineer roadmap. New to the role? Start with what a Forward Deployed Engineer does.