How I Work
The same seven steps whether the customer is an enterprise operations team or a two-person SME. The order matters more than the tooling: most delivery failures I have seen were decided before any code was written.
01
Discover
Sit with the people doing the work today and document the current process as it really runs, not as the org chart describes it. Most of what matters is not in the brief.
02
Define
Draw the proposed flow, walk the stakeholder through it, and get written confirmation before engineering starts. Name what is explicitly out of scope, and what is deliberately deferred to a second phase.
03
Design
Decide what to buy and what to build before deciding how to build it. Integrate the commodity parts, hand-build the critical path, and be honest about which constraints are real — connectivity, permissions, someone else’s release cycle, a budget that will not stretch.
04
Build
Take the complex, contract-defining work personally; delegate the straightforward surface. When a task has no clear direction after thirty minutes, it becomes a design discussion instead of silent rework.
05
Deploy
Assume the environment is not mine to change. Integrate without invading: read from what exists, checkpoint long runs so an interruption resumes instead of restarting, and always leave a path for a person to take over mid-run.
06
Measure
Decide up front what “working” means and how it will be observed — retry behaviour, failure visibility, cost per request, and for AI systems an evaluation set rather than an impression.
07
Iterate
Ship the phase, keep the second phase’s prerequisites visible, and let what production reveals reorder the backlog.
Roughly two thirds of a project is settled in the first conversations. The rest is engineering — and engineering is much cheaper when the first two thirds were done properly.
My own estimate, stated as an estimate.
Where this shows up
- Taking the typing out of a document workflow that could not go offline — mapping an undocumented process before automating any of it
- Building against a system we did not own — signed-off specifications before engineering started
- Three AI proposals, and the two I advised against — a costed estimate that let two customers say no cheaply
Let’s talk
Forward Deployed Engineer · Forward Deployed AI Engineer · Applied AI Engineer · Solutions Engineer · Customer Engineer · AI Solutions Architect · Technical Delivery Lead
Based in Selangor, Malaysia. Open to client-site work in the Klang Valley, including long-term placement, and to Singapore-based and regional APAC projects.