Free Lesson
FDE Scoping Messy Problems: Founding FDE and O'Reilly Author
30 min
Oct 9, 2026 2:00 PM
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What you'll learn
Hear the problem under the request
What customers ask for versus what they need, and the questions that surface the gap before you build anything.
Cut scope without losing the customer
How to narrow the work, say what you're not doing, and keep the room bought in instead of feeling shortchanged.
Recognize when discovery is done
The signal that you have enough to start building, and why staying in discovery too long costs you credibility.
Why this topic matters
This part of the job has no equivalent in normal engineering. There's no ticket and no spec. A customer describes a symptom, and the thing they ask you to build is usually not the thing that fixes it. Get it wrong and you burn weeks and trust at the same time. This is the skill that separates FDEs who last from ones who don't. I do this job. Not a version of it from five years ago, and not a version I read about.
