FDE discovery is the structured process a forward deployed engineer runs to validate what a customer actually needs before writing a line of production code — the highest-leverage phase in any deployment. This playbook breaks it into five phases: Scope, Interview, Synthesize, Validate, and Spec.

Forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) at Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir, Databricks, and Cohere run customer discovery as a core part of the job — not a hand-off to product managers.