Project · Beginner · about 8 hours
From a vague ask to a pilot plan
Play the forward deployed engineer for an online store's support team, analyse their message backlog, and write the discovery notes and a one-page pilot plan with a measured baseline.
Skills:Communication, Customer-facing delivery, SQL, Stakeholder management
Part of: Forward Deployed Engineer
Data and licences
- Bitext customer support dataset (synthetic, 26,872 messages) ↗CDLA-Sharing-1.0
Brief
The head of support at an online store says: "We want AI to help with support." Their team handles questions about orders, refunds, invoices, delivery and accounts. The Bitext dataset stands in for their message history: 26,872 messages labelled with 11 categories and 27 intents. It is synthetic, which is useful for practice and a limit you must state.
Your job is not to build anything yet. It is to find out what would be worth building, and to write a plan the sponsor can say yes or no to.
What to build
Ask a friend to play the head of support using a short persona sheet you write (goals, pains, constraints). Run a 30-minute discovery call and write notes in the five areas: workflow, pain, data, people, success.
Load the dataset into DuckDB or pandas. Report volume by category and intent, and pick the two or three intents that are the best pilot candidates. Explain why.
Define a baseline you could measure at a real customer (handling time, first-response time, reopen rate) and how you would collect it. Mark which numbers are assumptions.
Write the pilot plan on one page: scope in and out, success criteria, guardrails, weekly plan, owners on both sides and a decision date.
Record a three-minute walkthrough for the sponsor.
Deliverables
Repository with
discovery-notes.md,analysis/,pilot-plan.mdand a link to the recording
How it is graded
Reviewers read the plan as the sponsor would. The key question: would they know exactly what they are agreeing to, and how success will be judged?
Stretch
Write the security questionnaire answers you expect to need (data flows, storage region, retention, access) for the pilot.
Deliverables
- Discovery notes from a role-played call, in the five-area format
- A baseline analysis of message volume by category and intent, with SQL or pandas you can rerun
- A one-page pilot plan with scope, baseline, success criteria, guardrails, owners and a decision date
- A three-minute recorded walkthrough of the plan for the sponsor
How a reviewer grades it
| Criterion | Weight | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery notes separate facts, assumptions and open questions | 25% | |
| Baseline analysis is correct, reproducible and answers the sponsor's question | 25% | |
| Success criteria are measurable and tied to the baseline | 30% | |
| Plan and walkthrough are clear enough for a non-technical sponsor | 20% |