Deliver an FDE project
A forward deployed engagement turns what a client asked for into a workspace their team runs on. Understand their workflow whole before you scope a slice of it, work carefully once you are inside, start from an App that already runs, and build the first one that does their work.
Their whole workflow, and the slice you are building
You cannot scope a slice you have not seen whole. Before anything is opened, you should be able to draw the client's process from end to end and point at the part this project is for.
Draw the process end to end
Who does what, in what order, how often, and where it stalls. Two pages rather than a paragraph. Everything you build later is measured against this document.
Interview the people who run it
Not only the buyer. The person who does the work every week knows the exceptions, and the exceptions decide whether the App still gets used after you leave.
Name the slice this project is
Which part of that workflow you are building now, and which part is the next project. Saying the second one out loud is what stops it living on as an expectation.
Agree what finished looks like
The specific runs that have to work, on real data and on the client's own accounts, and the person at the client who owns it once you are gone.
A project is finished when someone at the client can change it without calling you.
Kylon Partner ProgramWhat to be careful with once you are inside
You are working in a live company's workspace, with their accounts and their conversations in it. A few habits are what keep a delivery from turning into an incident.
Work as yourself
Your own member account, in rooms the client can see, rather than through somebody else's login. Everything you change should be attributable to you.
Draft in a room of your own
Do the messy part in a project room, then move what works into the rooms people use. Nobody wants a half-built App appearing in the room they work in.
Least access that still finishes the work
Connections attach to a person or an agent, with a reason. Widening one to the whole workspace to unblock yourself is the change nobody remembers making.
Their data is theirs
Real records are for the acceptance runs, not for experiments. Nothing leaves the workspace, and no sample rows are left behind in a room the team is about to use.
Improve an App that already runs
The first App you build is not the first App you build from nothing. Open a template, find the part that does not match this client, and change that. It is the fastest way to learn the shape of an App and the fastest thing to put in front of the client.
Open the one that is closest
Pick by the shape of the data rather than by the industry name. A sampling desk and a warranty queue are the same App with different words on it.
Change one thing the client named
A field they call something else, a status they do not use, the view the owner wants open every morning. Small, real, and theirs.
The templates to start from
Client builds by scenario and by industry, and the three working Apps partners open most often.
See what to buildTables first, screens after
An App is its data model. Get the tables, the fields and the relations right and the screens follow from them. Get them wrong and every screen after that is a workaround.
List the things before the tables
Creators, samples, invoices, shifts. One table per thing that has a life of its own. If two things are always created and deleted together, they are one table.
Fields the client already says out loud
Name fields the way the team names them in a meeting. A field nobody can read aloud is a field nobody fills in.
Relations, one direction at a time
Which record belongs to which. Say it as a sentence first — a sample belongs to a creator — and only then build it. Most broken Apps are a sentence nobody said.
Faster to something that works
Load ten real rows before you build a single screen. Decide the status values before the statuses. Build the owner's morning view first. Then let the agent in the room create a few records, because that is where the model starts arguing with the work.
One client project through acceptance, with a named owner on the client's side.
Bring a project to us before you quote it
Tell us the client and the work, and we will go through the scope and the acceptance standard with you while it is still cheap to change.