THE FDE PROCESS / FIELD TO CAPABILITY
Forward-deployed engineering brings delivery into real work: understand the judgments, connect methods and tools, evaluate on real tasks, and retain what works.
Download the process guideDefine who uses the result, how the work is done today and why improving it matters.
Map the goal, resource constraints and baseline. Select a valuable use case with usable inputs.
A business owner explains the goal and provides current examples.
Follow a task through its inputs, judgments, tools and output. Find where expertise makes the difference.
Identify sources, missing information, business definitions, exclusion rules and recurring errors.
A practitioner demonstrates the task and explains key decisions.
Make expert judgment callable, challengeable and testable.
Specify Skill inputs, decision criteria, templates, counterexamples, evidence boundaries and dependencies.
An expert reviews the method and contributes difficult examples.
Agents hold goals and context. Skills provide methods. Tools perform actions.
Connect real data and entry points. Use multiple perspectives when useful and keep simple tasks direct.
Provide the agreed data and tool access, and review outputs.
Compare quality, time, rework and cost on the same material. A demo is not a business evaluation.
Agree samples and criteria. Track evidence accuracy, business adoption and total effort.
Business users judge usefulness and record actual follow-through.
Retain corrections, feedback and adaptations so the next task starts from a better place.
Hand over capabilities, versions, dependencies, examples and ownership. Separate shared methods from client-specific settings.
Confirm maintenance ownership and the next improvements.
WHAT FIELDWORK TEACHES US
Matching names may hide different entities. Cumulative data may not be additive. Resolve identity, grain, time and definitions before automating analysis.
Retain: definition cards and test casesHigh potential is not high confidence. Retain evidence, disagreement and unknowns so the business knows what to pursue and what to verify.
Retain: judgment rules and an evidence indexGeneration does not prove sending, adoption or resolution. Include human corrections, waiting, tool costs and actual use.
Retain: comparisons and improvementsTHE COMPOUNDING OUTPUT
Briefs, shortlists, drafts, analysis and options
Skills, templates, counterexamples and test cases
Role Agents, tool configurations and entry points
Sources, dependencies, versions and ownership
Manage shared methods separately from client-specific data, configuration and commercial information. Reuse does not mean taking or publishing client material.
START WITH ONE REAL PROBLEM
You do not need a complete AI strategy. Start with a recurring problem, one existing example and someone who will actually use the result.