Customer Context
Reading the organization you are deployed into
Your first system isn't the software. It's the customer's organization: who actually decides, who's quietly against this, which process is written down and which one people really follow. Everything technical downstream depends on reading that correctly, and it's the competency most engineers show up without.
Progression
What changes at each level.
- FDE I
Deployed
Knows the names and roles of the people in their working sessions. Asks how the current process works before proposing a change. Brings surprises back to their lead instead of acting on them alone.
- FDE II
Embedded
Maps the stakeholders around their workstream without being asked, including the ones not in the meetings. Identifies who has to change their behaviour for the work to land, and factors that into sequencing. Recognises a political objection dressed as a technical one and escalates it rather than arguing the technology.
- FDE III
Trusted
Holds an accurate model of the account: budget cycle, competing internal initiatives, who is protecting headcount, which executive's reputation is attached to this. Uses it to time proposals and to route decisions to the person who can actually make them. Predicts internal resistance before it appears.
- FDE IV
Principal
Reads a whole class of customer, not one account. Can say what is structurally true about deployments in this sector and what changes between them. Advises sales and product on which customers are winnable and which will fail regardless of engineering effort, and is right often enough that people plan around it.