customer management

The deployment worked. The software runs, the data flows, the demo landed. Nobody is using it. Two of the three research sets we vetted surfaced this from different angles, and it is the failure mode that ends renewals.

Nothing about the software changed. The single person whose belief the contract rested on is gone, and the replacement has more to gain from cancelling your project than from finishing it.

The structural tension of the job in one question. You are the customer's advocate inside your company and your company's representative at the customer, and this is the day those two roles openly disagree.

The most common real ticket in applied AI, and it contains almost no information. What you do in the first hour decides whether you spend a day on this or three weeks.

The trap is that it looks like a prioritization problem you can solve with a scoring rubric. You do not have the authority to rank these people's work, and the moment you try, you have made yourself the obstacle.

Three individually reasonable requests create an impossible week. Build a capacity ledger, protect existing obligations and obtain a decision from the people who can change cross-account commitments.