In this episode, we dive into Chapter 7 of The Forward Deployed Engineer: Architecting the Last Mile of Enterprise AI by Sho Shimoda [1, 2]. We explore the crucial first two weeks of an FDE engagement, known as the discovery phase, and why compressing this timeline to rush into building is a costly mistake that leads to failed deployments [2, 3].

Tune in as we break down the three concrete outputs every successful discovery phase must produce [3, 4]:

• The Stakeholder Map: Identifying sponsors, users, skeptics, and passengers, and using "snowball mapping" to find the people who can actually determine the engagement's outcome [4, 5].
• The Workflow Inventory: Moving beyond static process diagrams to document real operational details like inputs, exceptions, handoff points, and metrics [6, 7].
• The Eval-Customer Split: Making the critical business decision about which parts of a workflow the AI will handle automatically versus which parts will be routed to a human reviewer [8-10].

We also discuss the "Weird Tuesday" Problem—the atypical edge cases that happen on a random Tuesday, which standard AI demos miss, but which often contain the most operational value and risk [11, 12]. You will learn why FDEs use asynchronous interviews to uncover these hidden realities instead of relying solely on executive sponsors, who often don't know the actual floor operations [13-15].

📚 Get the Book!

If you are interested in these contents and would like to know more about mastering the customer discovery phase, please purchase Sho Shimoda's book on Amazon and tell others about it!

Buy it here: The Forward Deployed Engineer on Amazon

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