1 min lesson
Discovery that quantifies pain
Connect "Bad discovery demos features into that room" to the decision you would make.
Step 1 of 2
At Cursor the buyer is often a room full of engineers who already use the product and a CTO who wants to know what it costs. Bad discovery demos features into that room. Good discovery finds the bottleneck in how their team ships code, then puts a number on it.
Cursor's motion is often bottom-up. Devs adopt it on their own, so the pain isn't "we have no AI tooling." It sits further upstream, where the engineering leader feels it in the roadmap. Your job on the first call is to get past "the team likes it" and reach "here is the cost we carry every week, in hours."
The engineers in the buyer's room screen for whether you understand engineering work. Cursor does not publish its AE interview stages, so treat discovery as the place where that understanding shows. A Tab-completion demo as your opener sounds like a vendor. The question "where does a typical change wait the longest before it ships?" sounds like someone who could sell to a skeptical staff engineer.
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Full explanation
The Discovery Arc
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
Each step is a gate: skip one and the deal you forecast isn't real yet.