The pilot passes its quality gate and the sponsor says launch. Data approval is still pending. What next?
A passing evaluation and an enthusiastic sponsor can coexist with a blocked release. Separate the decisions, preserve useful progress and write a recommendation with a specific approval dependency.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
A passing evaluation and an enthusiastic sponsor can coexist with a blocked release. Separate the decisions, preserve useful progress and write a recommendation with a specific approval dependency.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
