The FDE-DE Playbook
The practitioner's operating manual once you're in role. 90-day plan, weekly cadence templates, working-agreement template, discovery question banks, kill-decision worksheets, runbook templates, escalation playbook, handoff checklist. Designed to be reused — copy, paste, adapt per deployment.
How to use this
This isn't a deep dive on theory — it's the bench of templates and procedures an FDE-DE actually runs. Skim once end-to-end so you know what's here; then pull individual chapters when you need them on a deployment. Most templates are designed to copy directly into Notion, Google Docs, or your team's wiki.
Section A · First 90 days
00Start Here
How to use this playbook, the operating mental model, what's in each section.
01The 90-Day Plan
Days 1–14 (discovery), 15–30 (first slice), 31–60 (scale to SLA), 61–90 (mature + plan handoff). Concrete week-by-week milestones.
02Discovery Template & Question Bank
The questions to ask each persona in week one — data team, business sponsor, IT/security, end-users — with the artifact each question produces.
Section B · Operating model
03Working Agreement Template
The one-page doc that anchors the deployment — objective, scope, success criteria, timeline, owners, kill criteria. Copy-paste ready.
04Cadence & Status Templates
Monday sync agenda, Friday status doc template (5 sections, one-screen), internal Thursday sync, monthly leadership update.
Section C · The hard parts
05Scoping & Kill Criteria
How to scope ambiguous customer asks; the kill-decision worksheet; how to surface "this deployment isn't going to ship" before week 8.
06Runbook Templates
Six pre-written runbooks: pipeline failure, quality alert, schema drift, backfill, new doc class, HITL queue overflow. Customize per deployment.
07Escalation Playbook
Three escalation lanes (platform / commercial / leadership), when to use each, what to put in the write-up, the "escalate early" instinct.
Section D · Handoff
08Handoff Checklist
The artifacts to leave behind so the customer's data team can own the deployment without you. Runbooks, training, sunset plan, on-call rotation.
09Common Deployment Failures
The dozen patterns that kill FDE-DE deployments — political stalemates, ERP gating, identity tickets stuck in IT, customer-data surprises. With prevention and recovery.