Roles and Responsibilities
The Harbourline pilot has eight weeks. In that time you will interview clerks, argue about scope, connect to three systems, ship a screen, count money and train a team to run it all without you. Without a map of the job, it is easy to spend week one coding and week eight still discovering the problem.
The rule
Discover, scope, build, prove, hand over — and carry lessons home.
An FDE owns an engagement from end to end. Each stage has a concrete job at Harbourline:
- Discover. Learn how carrier invoices are checked today, by sitting with the accounts-payable (AP) clerks and reading real invoices.
- Scope. Agree what the pilot covers, for example the 10 busiest carriers and two kinds of charge, and write down what it leaves out.
- Build. Connect to the AP mailbox, the transport management system (TMS) that records every shipment, and the rate-card spreadsheets. Deploy inside Harbourline's cloud and ship a review screen.
- Prove. Measure the result against how things were before: minutes per invoice, overcharges caught.
- Hand over. Write the runbook, train the people, and make sure named Harbourline staff own each part.
- Carry lessons home. Tell Loomwork's product team what the field taught you.
Some responsibilities have no stage of their own because they run through all of them: being the customer's trusted technical contact, protecting their data, explaining trade-offs honestly, and speaking for the customer's reality inside your own company.
The stages overlap in practice. A surprise in week five can send you back to discovery for a day. But knowing which stage a piece of work belongs to stops you from doing it at the wrong time.
The shortcut
Name the stage before you act. When a request arrives, ask which stage it belongs to. If it belongs to a stage you are not in, do not start it; route it to the right place.
The request
In week three, while you are building, Meera Iyer, Harbourline's VP of Finance, asks whether the tool could also check warehouse-rental invoices.
The two classic failures sit at either end: skipping discovery and building the wrong thing, or disappearing after go-live and leaving a system nobody can run.
Drills
Answer fast — trust the rule.
Which order matches an FDE engagement?
Which activity belongs to the "prove" stage?
A month after go-live, the pipeline stops while you are on leave, and nobody at Harbourline knows how to restart it. Which stage was done badly?
Which of these is NOT part of an FDE's responsibilities?
On day two, while you are still learning how invoices flow, Farhan asks you to "just quickly" add a new report. What does the shortcut suggest?
Remember
- Discover, scope, build, prove, hand over — and carry lessons home.
- Shortcut: name the stage before you act, and route each request to the stage it belongs to.
- Trap: skipping discovery, or leaving without a real handover.