magnus919_agent-skills/forward-deployed-engineering/references/discovery-brief.md

Discovery Brief — Forward-Deployed Engineering

Scope and design decision

The requested capability is designed as a public, business-agnostic continuity bundle for embedded technical engagements. Portability is a normative design objective, not a conclusion established by the employer-authored sources. Its normative synthesis is the lifecycle Discover → Frame → Hypothesize → Build → Evaluate → Deploy → Adopt → Measure → Generalize, plus shared artifacts, authority gates, evidence labels, and a generalization decision. This sequence is bundle design, not an externally standardized methodology.

Overlap audit

Existing owner	Already owns	FDE bundle boundary
product-discovery	Stakeholder mapping, workflow walkthroughs, hidden assumptions, validation, and interpretation handoff	Routes discovery and carries its evidence forward; does not duplicate discovery method
agent-evals-and-observability	Decision/risk contracts, datasets, baselines, graders, trajectory review, release gates, telemetry, and incident learning	Routes evaluation evidence and applies it to engagement continuity; does not restate eval method
production-readiness	Risk-scaled evidence, ownership, SLOs, observability, support, security, data, rollback, capacity, cost, and verdicts	Routes readiness at the deployment boundary; does not invent a customer-site readiness method
remote-systems-administration	Access routes, privilege, bastions, sessions, recovery, rollback, canaries, bounded rollout, and external verification	Routes constrained-environment discovery before action; does not create a second remote-operations runbook
product-lifecycle	Product investment and lifecycle governance	FDE owns embedded delivery continuity, not portfolio choice or product lifecycle governance
production-excellence	Cross-domain production gate and handoff	FDE prepares engagement continuity and routes evidence; production-excellence owns its launch gate
neckbeard	Bounded software change journey	FDE stops routing and sends a well-specified repository change directly to neckbeard

The four audited class-level skills are not modified by this bundle. The manifest routes to them where their existing methods are needed.

Themes across the source set

The three sources do not establish one common role contract. Palantir supports embedded implementation, engineering review and operation, and return of field configurations and expertise. OpenAI supports discovery through rollout, adoption and workflow-impact measurement, eval-driven feedback, and pattern codification. The limited Databricks extract supports customer-facing productionization and cross-functional work. Together they orient the bundle, but no source proves the full nine-stage lifecycle or every artifact. They also do not establish a universal title, staffing model, technology stack, travel pattern, or lifecycle sequence. See source-index.md.

Design risks and mitigations

The following are risks this normative design is intended to guard against; the source set does not establish their frequency or prevalence.

Design risk	Continuity mitigation
Bespoke-service sprawl	Record reuse boundary and generalization decision for every local solution
Hero culture	Name authority, review, support, and receiving owners; make escalation normal
Prototype-to-production collapse	Require baseline, representative/adversarial evaluation, readiness evidence, rollback, and a release decision
Product bypass	Preserve field-learning and productization records; route patterns to an accountable receiving owner
Weak decision authority	Charter decision rights and stop conditions before action; escalate out-of-charter decisions
Customer capture	Define exit, transfer, adoption owner, support path, and measurable completion conditions
Technical success with adoption failure	Diagnose workflow, trust, education, activation, support, and ownership before more build work