customer scenarios

The modal opener for FDE customer rounds, and most engineers fail it in the first 90 seconds by pitching architecture. Here's the question sequence that scores, and the trap hidden in the word 'chatbot.'

The most common objection in enterprise AI, and arguing back is the fastest way to fail it. The winning sequence is validate, diagnose, reframe, de-risk. Here's the script.

Undefined success is how pilots die in 'one more month' purgatory. Here's the facilitation script that converts 'it should just be good' into numbers, baselines, and a decision date the customer owns.

The first use case decides the whole account, pick a flashy-but-doomed one and there's no second. Here's the value × feasibility × data-readiness workshop that strong FDEs run, hour by hour.

Interviewers sometimes sabotage demos on purpose to ask exactly this. The recovery has a 60-second protocol, and done well, a broken demo can close harder than a perfect one.

The pure autonomy test: no one to ask, a customer waiting, and a scope line in front of you. Strong candidates reveal a decision rule, not a guess. Here's the rule.

'Too expensive' after a winning pilot is a solvable engineering problem wearing a procurement costume. Here's the diagnose-then-optimize playbook, including the 10x cost levers, that turns it around.

The Palantir classic. He's not irrational, your product might really make his role redundant, and escalating over him is the losing move. Here's the playbook that converts the blocker.

The nightmare scenario every agent deployment signs up for. Interviewers grade the first hour hardest, containment before diagnosis, honoring the invented policy, and who you call in what order.

The eng lead isn't testing your architecture, he's already decided you should go and is performing it for the room. Trying to win the technical argument is the trap. Here's how to split his audience from his position and leave with a next meeting.

You hit 71% against an 85% bar nobody wants to say out loud, and the easy moves (quietly redefine the metric, ask for 'one more month') are how pilots rot in purgatory. Here's the honest salvage path, and how to recommend a kill without losing the account.

Both dials broke at once and now the most senior person in the building wants answers. The instinct to lead with explanation is how you lose the room in the first minute. Here's the structure that turns an execution interrogation into a decision meeting you control.

The capability isn't real, the ink is dry, and the customer found out from you, not your AE. Throwing sales under the bus and quietly building vaporware both fail. Here's how to reset the expectation without breaking the account or the internal relationship.

The graded shape is specific: learn and ship something small by day 30, own a deployment by day 60, drive a cross-customer improvement by day 90. Vague answers about 'meeting stakeholders and ramping up' fail. Here is the staged plan with what good looks like at each gate.

Around 95% of enterprise AI pilots produce no measurable impact, almost always from deployment, not the model. As the first FDE in a skeptical SWE shop, your month-one job is to not be pilot 95: pick a project that can win, prove it in 30 days, and turn the engineers who roll their eyes into the ones who vouch for you.

The gap is real, the date is close, and the business is about to ask if you'll make it. The wrong first move is to start tuning prompts. The strong move is to split the failure into causes you can act on, give the business an honest forecast with options, and protect the launch even if you can't fully close the gap.

The screen is whether you build for your own replaceability or your own indispensability. Strong answers treat the handoff as a deliverable with a graduation criterion, not a final week of doc-dumping. Here is what to leave behind, how to transfer it, and the trap that sounds generous.

Candidate reports describe a Palantir round where you are handed unfamiliar material, given time with it, and asked to explain it. It is the job in miniature: an FDE learns a customer's domain in a week and has to be useful by Thursday. The scoring is on what you chose to teach, and on what you admitted you did not learn.