The forward deployed engineer is the new and hot role in AI, and most job descriptions ask for eight to twelve years of software experience. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas think that requirement is looking in the wrong place. In this episode of The Missing Manual, they make the case that the person best equipped to get a forward deployed engineer role right is often a great recruiter who has never written a line of code.

A forward deployed engineer gets to know a specific user's problem in full, understands its one-size-fits-one nature, then reverse-engineers a build to solve it and ships it into that user's world. Jenny walks through the double diamond design model that sits underneath the work, where you define the right thing before you build the thing right. Her own aha moment is the heart of the episode. The eight to twelve years of experience she has for this role did not come from software. It came from talent acquisition, where you work with a hiring manager to define what right looks like, then go find that person in the wild.

Julia adds the piece that makes or breaks it. Design bias is the wall. The people who have already decided how a problem should be solved cannot see the problem clearly enough to solve it, and a career insider who has done everything the same way for years can be the most stuck of all. The two of them name the recruiter traits that map directly onto the FDE skill set, from tactical empathy to building relationships across departments to deconstructing a role into the parts that actually matter. They point to sourcers like Shally Steckerl who were doing this work before the title existed.

For HR and TA leaders, the takeaway is practical. Before you hire an engineer, look at the full-cycle recruiter or sourcer you already have, because the business to technical translation this role runs on is a skill your best people are already using. The Missing Manual exists to hand you the how that never makes it into the manual, and this episode gives you a clear way to find forward deployed engineer talent inside your own team. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

Job posting errors cost employers more than embarrassment. Missing salary data in transparency states, template instructions published by accident, and dropped EEO statements create legal exposure and send candidates a signal about how the organization runs. In a world where LLMs read and rank job content, those errors also make employers harder to discover. On this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas dig into why these errors are everywhere and what AI agents can now do about them.

Jenny shares the story behind Rec Check, an agent she built after an industry friend asked whether AI could audit his company's public job postings. The agent pulls a public job feed, indexes every error, and returns a list with the requisition number, the problem, and a recommended fix. Her audit across 1,100 live postings at one organization surprised both of them, and the same concept worked when pointed at Ashby, Greenhouse, and iCIMS feeds.

The bigger lesson comes from a principle Jenny learned from a former leader: lean teams cannot afford symptom mitigation alone. Many posting errors trace back to configuration issues upstream in the ATS, so the agent also flags the problems that can be fixed once at the source. Julia adds the talent acquisition leader's view from 25 years inside Fortune 500 organizations, including why candidates judge employers for posting errors the same way recruiters judge resumes, and where compliance mistakes turn into settlements.

The Missing Manual is built for working professionals who want the practical how, not the theory. If you run a TA function and have never audited your live postings, this episode will change your Monday. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

How to write better AI prompts is less about memorizing a framework and more about learning to have a real conversation. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas break down what actually makes a prompt work and why letting the AI help you build the prompt is one of the fastest ways to get there.

Most people either type into AI like it's a Google search or freeze up worrying their prompt isn't good enough. This episode covers how to narrow the aperture, use constraints as a superpower, save your best prompts for reuse, and know when to bring in a different tool for a different job.

Chapters

Hosts: Julia Levy (julia-levy.com) + Jenny Cotie Kangas | The Missing Manual Podcast

Tags: prompt engineering, AI prompts, how to use AI, AI for HR, AI for recruiters, AI productivity, ChatGPT prompts, Claude AI, Gemini AI, LLM prompts, AI strategy, agentic AI, future of work, Julia Levy, Jenny Cotie Kangas, The Missing Manual podcast, AI tools, AI for professionals, workplace AI, AI tips

Your Network Read is a tool Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas built to help people show up correctly on LinkedIn — whether they're actively job searching, building a personal brand, or selling into their network. This episode of The Missing Manual is what happened when Jenny Cotie Kangas stopped building it and actually ran it on herself.

The output was immediate and specific. Skills tagged as Microsoft Office that hadn't been relevant in years. An industry classification left over from a previous role. Gaps that were invisible until the tool named them. JCK walked away with a clearer LinkedIn and a sharper reminder of why they built Your Network Read in the first place: most people don't know what's working against them until something shows them. The tool shows them.

Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas also talk through what it actually looks like to bring a product to market when it's just the two of you — no marketing team, no launch playbook, no blueprint to follow. The mindset that's making it work: stop asking what could go wrong and start asking what if it went right. Julia brings in a parallel reframe she used with job seekers in graduate school, and JCK shares the free two-part prompt she posted on LinkedIn this week to help people define their version of good before they start a search. It's been tested across industries and career levels, and the feedback has been consistent: people hadn't thought through this before.

Life has also been a lot. Julia's dad had open heart surgery. The Missing Manual missed a week. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas showed up anyway. Find Your Network Read and the free job seeker prompt on JCK's LinkedIn. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

When life moves fast and nothing goes according to plan, most people don't need another framework. They need a map for the moment the frameworks don't cover. That's what this episode of The Missing Manual is.

Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas (JCK) are bringing you into a real week.  Julia traveled to Florida for a short trip to help a parent through knee surgery and ended up staying through an ICU stay and an upcoming surgical procedure. JCK stepped fully into her consulting company, Whiterock Road, after exiting her last role, and navigated what it looks like to move forward with clarity when the timing isn't clean. Both hosts missed a week of the show. Both kept going anyway.

In this conversation, Julia and JCK talk through what actually helped: accepting support from people you didn't expect to show up, articulating what you need even when you're not sure, and finding the specific, personal version of good that regulates you when everything else feels uncertain. JCK's version involved a ten-dollar gallon of paint and a backyard she's been slowly reclaiming. Julia's involved hospital hallway walks, text threads, and a few minutes of sunshine between doctor updates. One size fits one. That's the through-line.

They also talk about Julia's AI tool, Your Network Read, currently in final build-out with JCK's help, and what it looks like to hand a passion project to someone you trust when you don't have the headspace or time to carry it yourself. That's not failure. That's a pivot. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

What happens when you build something useful in AI and then life gets in the way for two weeks? Most people lose everything they built and start over. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas show you how to pick back up without losing momentum — using their own podcast production system as the case study.

Julia and Jenny walk through re-grounding their Claude project, recovering prior work from across tools, and building a five-phase process map with a companion grounding document that will anchor every future session. They cover why you need two paired documents for any mapped process — a visual map and a context document that captures what the map cannot — and why those documents are what make automation possible later. Jenny's core principle throughout: if you don't collect the dots, you can't connect the dots.

The episode closes on what Julia calls the most important document they produced all day: the handoff. When you are doing big thinking work in AI, the context window is limited, and compiling too much on top of itself leads to hallucinations. A clean handoff document at each stopping point is not overhead — it is the system that lets you come back. This applies to podcast production, client deliverables, hiring processes, or any repeated work effort where continuity matters.

The Missing Manual exists because the how is missing everywhere. This episode is the how for anyone who has ever started something in AI, paused, and wondered how to find their way back in. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

Welcome back to The Missing Manual with your hosts, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas (JCK). In this episode, we are right in the middle of a multi-part series detailing the real, unvarnished work it takes to build a content engine and operationalize AI for daily work.

Too often, people get frustrated with AI because they expect it to read their minds. Today, we demonstrate a core truth: you cannot automate what you cannot see. We share our personal back-and-forth building a comprehensive Markdown instructions file for our Claude Projects. We discuss the transition from tactical execution (acting as a production assistant) to strategic advisory (acting as an operational Chief of Staff).

Whether you are looking to scale an internal talent function, smooth out cross-functional handoffs, clean up your Canva asset pipelines, or just fix your messy workflows, this episode provides a strategy-first framework for learning out loud.

Inside the Episode:

The Split Path: How we navigated different ideas for our next steps by letting AI evaluate the best operational path forward.

The Dual-Mode Prompt: Designing system instructions that govern both administrative task delivery and high-level decision tracking.

The Crucial Prerequisite: Spotting gaps in your operational process (like missing template locks) before pushing a workflow live.

The Handoff Habit: Why generating a clean handoff document at every natural pause is the secret weapon to preventing context drift and saving your sanity.

Don't forget to look out for our upcoming episodes where we operationalize this live and push our first episodes through the new engine to see where it breaks—and how we fix it.

If you enjoyed this strategy-first look into practical AI application, please remember to like, subscribe, and share this episode with someone trying to streamline their daily operations!

Documenting the Mess Before You Automate

"Automating a broken process just breaks things faster." 

In this episode of The Missing Manual, JCK and Julia take you behind the scenes of their own operational chaos. This is part 3 of our ongoing series on operationalizing AI for a specific, real-world use case: running this exact podcast.

Julia does a complete verbal download of the current, highly manual production workflow, from editing in Riverside and wrestling with inconsistent thumbnail creation in Canva/Google, to manual file renaming on her Mac downloads folder and navigating the LinkedIn algorithm. 

Before touching a single automation line, the team uses Claude to map out the current state. JCK steps onto her soapbox to explain why HR, TA, and business leaders must document every shadow process and departmental variation before trying to automate. If you don't map the friction, you simply bake the friction directly into your AI system.

Tune in to hear:

Stay tuned for the next episode as we dive into defining the rules of the road and building out the actual project instructions!

Two Brand Voices, One Show: How We Train AI to Speak for Both of Us

When two distinct creators collaborate, how do you ensure the content speaks with a unified voice—without losing the hard-earned, earned beliefs of either host?

In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas dive deep into the mechanics of operationalizing their show using AI. This isn't about quick hacks or shortcuts; it's a strategic, behind-the-scenes look at how to merge individual "Brand Voice Bibles" into a singular, cohesive AI grounding document.

Tune in as we discuss how we are training our AI to step into the role of our virtual Production Assistant and Chief of Staff. You’ll learn how to establish unified guardrails (like our shared, yet distinct, hatred of the em-dash), how to handle stylistic friction, and why the secret to scaling your workflow lies in defining a clear "blueprint for good."

Key Takeaways for Your Work:

Don't get stuck on the tool: The foundational strategy applies whether you are using Claude Projects, Gemini Gems, or Custom GPTs.

Why your AI needs to know what "bad" looks like just as much as it knows what "good" looks like.

The workflow pipeline: How to collaborate with the tool to get a draft 85% of the way there, and how to feed your final 100% version back in to train it for the future.

Have you built a grounding document for your own business operations yet? Let us know your thoughts on LinkedIn at The Missing Manual page!

In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas teach you how to build an AI workflow for any repetitive task by working through a real example in real time. They use their own podcast production process as the case study, but the framework they walk through applies to almost anything clunky and manual that drains hours from your week. The three moves are simple: follow the friction, map the process, reverse engineer it with AI and automation.

Julia and JCK make the case that the real skill in working with AI is not picking one perfect tool, it's knowing when to use best-in-class for a specific gap and when good-enough all-in-one is the smarter call. Julia brings the operator's lens from her work in talent acquisition leadership, where she's evaluated this exact tradeoff with talent technology. JCK reframes the conversation around systems thinking, pushing listeners to zoom out from the specific use case and look at the underlying pattern they can copy.

A through-line of the episode is keeping the human in the loop on purpose. AI tools still produce odd outputs, hands with extra fingers, faces that drift across ethnicities, so the hosts are designing their workflow to let AI generate a slate of options while a human makes the final call. It's a practical model for anyone who wants to use AI without handing over judgment.

This is the kickoff of a multi-part series on The Missing Manual where Julia and JCK build the workflow live, including the stumbles. If you have a repetitive task at work or at home that is ripe for automation, this episode gives you the framework to start on it today.

Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.