1 min lesson
Who you work with and the tradeoffs you own
Use "Who you work with and the tradeoffs you own" to explain each part and the role it plays.
Step 1 of 2
Your hardest audience is a senior or staff engineer at the customer who has seen tools over-promise before. You earn their trust by being right about their codebase quickly, not by being friendly. Everything else flows from that credibility.
Your stakeholder map
- Primary
- Senior / staff customer engineers - the people who adopt or reject what you build
- Customer leadership
- VP/Director of Eng who owns the metric and the budget
- Cursor GTM
- Sales partners you ride along with; you own delivery, they own the commercial relationship
- Cursor product / eng
- Where you route reusable patterns and real-world model-failure findings
Credibility with the senior engineer is the gate. If they don't believe you understand their system, nothing you ship gets adopted, regardless of how leadership feels about the contract.