1 min lesson
Running discovery that finds the real bottleneck
Show why this lesson detail matters: "A customer engineer will hand you a problem statement."
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A customer engineer will hand you a problem statement. It is almost never the real problem. Your first job as a Forward Deployed EngineerAn engineer who embeds inside a customer's own engineering org to scope ambiguous problems and ship production-grade Cursor workflows a senior engineer keeps using after they leave. Press Enter for the full definition. is to find the bottleneck they can't see, then prove you found it before you propose a single line of work.
The stated ask is a symptom that already passed through a manager, a planning doc and someone's pet theory. "We want Cursor to auto-review PRs" might really mean review takes four days because two staff engineers are the only approvers and they're underwater. Auto-review the wrong way and you've added noise to a queue that was already the constraint.
The interviewer for the decomposition round is watching for one thing above all: do you scope or do you leap? An FDE who restates the brief and starts designing has already failed the most important filter. The one who says "before I build anything, I need to understand where time actually goes" has passed it.
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Full explanation
The Discovery Method, End to End
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Diagnose where time waits, agree a number, then earn the right to build.
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Optional practice
Practice: Running discovery that finds the real bottleneck
QWhich discovery question is most likely to locate the real bottleneck?