2 min lesson
Hold a technical boundary
Answer this: "A customer's staff engineer is openly frustrated: 'your tool wasted two days of my team's time and I'm getting questions from leadership.' How do you run the next 90 seconds?"
Step 1 of 3
Hold a technical boundary
Sometimes the customer wants something unsafe - auto-merge without review, an agent with write access to production, skipping the eval gate to hit a date. Saying yes to keep them happy is how you lose the account when it breaks. You hold the line and explain the why in their terms.
"I won't ship auto-merge without a human gate and here's why it protects you: the day an agent edit slips a regression into main with no reviewer on the hook, this whole program loses its credibility internally - and I'd rather hit your date with a gate than lose the program to one bad merge. Let me show you how the gate adds about ten minutes, not a day."
The goal of the whole conversation is one thing: a customer who adopts your workflow and trusts you with the next one. Winning the argument and losing the relationship is a loss.
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Optional practice
Practice: Hold a technical boundary
QThe customer demands auto-merge of agent edits with no human review to hit a deadline. What's the right move?