Twelve questions to ask before the engineers arrive.

Forward deployed engineers are the fastest way to get a deployment moving, and an unmanaged surface. They build in your environment, at their velocity, against their roadmap incentives. None of that is bad faith. It is the absence of a governance conversation that belongs in week one and usually happens in month nine. Ask these across the table, and write the answers down.

Type answers directly on this page; they stay in this browser only and print with the sheet. Check a box when a question has a written answer.

Visibility

1. Where is the running inventory of everything you build here, and who on our side can read it without asking you?
2. Which of our systems and data will you touch, and who on our side approves each new connection before it is made?
3. What are you building this month, and in which meeting do we hear that before it starts rather than after it ships?

Decision rights

4. What are you allowed to decide alone, what needs our named owner, and where is that line written down?
5. When what you are building overlaps something our own team owns, who decides which version lives?
6. When your roadmap and our priorities conflict, who do you escalate to on your side, and who is the counterpart on ours?

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TDcatalyst · The Deploy Kit

Instrument 02 · Vendor FDE governance, continued

Ownership

7. Who owns the code, the prompts, the configurations, and the integrations you build here if we part ways?
8. Which of our people can maintain each thing you build, and what is the plan for making that true where it is not?
9. What happens to everything you built when the contract ends: what transfers, in what form, with how much handover time?

Value

10. What measure of our output, not your activity, will show this engagement worked, and when do we read it together?
11. Which things you build are throwaway proofs and which are production, and who decides when one becomes the other?
12. What would make you tell us to stop or scale down, and has your team ever said that to a client?

If more than four of these have no written answer, the portfolio needs a governance pass before the next initiative starts. That is the AI Portfolio Review: tdcatalyst.com/grow.

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