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Forward Deployed

Forward Deployed
Discovery Foundations

Executive Dashboard Assistant

By Sourav Banerjee · Last updated 13 Oct 2026 · Report an issue

PracticeIntermediate2 min read
For
Engineers preparing for Forward Deployed, solutions or applied-AI engineering interviews
Assumes
Working familiarity with LLM applications: prompting, retrieval and tool calls
Objectives
  • Turn a vague customer request into users, workflows and measurable requirements
  • Propose a first architecture and say how you would evaluate and roll it out
How to use it
Time-box it to about 45 minutes. Draft each section before opening its model answer — a rough attempt teaches more than a blank one, and you do not need to fill every cell.

Original material for this site

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01

Interview prompt

Design a GenAI FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) solution for Executive Dashboard Assistant. The customer has ambiguous requirements, sensitive data, and expects a production rollout, not a demo.

02

Clarify the customer problem

  • What business process is broken today?
  • Who are the users and what decisions do they make?
  • What is the cost of delay, error, or manual work?
  • What data is available, trusted, missing, or restricted?
  • What does success mean in the first 30, 60, and 90 days?
03

Users and workflows

UserWorkflowCurrent painAI assist opportunityHuman approval needed?
Primary operator
Manager/reviewer
Admin/security
04

Requirements

Functional

Non-functional

  • Latency target
  • Availability target
  • Cost budget
  • Security/privacy constraints
  • Audit/compliance requirement
05

Data and integration map

Data sourceFormatOwnerFreshnessPermission modelRisk
06

Proposed architecture

Fill in each part of your architecture for this case:

  • Ingestion
  • Retrieval
  • Agent/tool use
  • Human approval
  • Evaluation
  • Monitoring
07

Evaluation plan

MetricGood thresholdBad thresholdTest datasetOwner
Answer groundedness>= 90%< 80%Golden Q&AFDE/SME
Permission violations0> 0Red-team setSecurity
Citation accuracy>= 95%< 85%Sample docsSME
Task completion>= 80%< 65%Workflow testsProduct
08

Failure modes

  • Bad retrieval or missing context
  • Hallucinated policy or procedure
  • Cross-tenant or role-based data leakage
  • Unsafe tool call or write-back action
  • Stale documents or bad sync
  • Cost/latency spike
09

Rollout plan

  1. Offline prototype using historical cases.
  2. SME review and evaluation set creation.
  3. Read-only pilot with citations.
  4. Human-approved actions.
  5. Limited production canary.
  6. Monitor, tune, and expand.
10

Weak vs strong answer

Weak: “I would use RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) with a vector database and ask GPT to answer.”

Strong: “I would first define the operational workflow and risk boundary, then design permission-aware retrieval with grounded citations, evals, red-team tests, human approval for risky actions, and production observability before rollout.”

11

Candidate scorecard

Evaluation
The closer

Final 2-minute spoken answer

Rehearse this out loud before you look at it. Summarising the whole design in two minutes is its own skill, and it is usually the last thing you are asked for.

Where next

Revise the concepts