Pre-customer environment access
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Secure access to the customer’s internal collaboration and development tooling as early as possible
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Align on the intended behavior, functionality, and architecture of the agents
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Define how the FDE team and customer engineering team will collaborate on use case and architecture definition, code, and execution
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Establish the deployment path for MongoDB’s tools across customer development and cloud environments
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Confirm business goals, technical scope, and success criteria for the engagement
During this phase, the Sr. Technical Program Manager partners with the assigned FDE team, account teams, and customer stakeholders to coordinate onboarding requirements, dependency management, planning, and readiness activities. This may include coordinating statements of work, contractor onboarding steps, access approvals, and early execution planning.
The pre-access period should also be used to build a shared understanding of the business value, intended behavior, and technical architecture of the agent. The team should prepare the technical design inputs needed to break the work into executable tasks in the customer’s preferred engineering collaboration environment.
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Mutually agreed-upon definition of success
Agent build and prototyping
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Enable the joint engineering team to develop agents locally and contribute to a shared code repository
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Establish a viable path to deployment in MongoDB’s production environment
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Support a single-team execution model across MongoDB and customer engineers
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Provide structured status updates and feedback loops to internal product stakeholders
During this phase, the team should adapt to the customer’s preferred engineering collaboration model where it supports execution. FDEs may lead or contribute to technical workstreams, while the Sr. Technical Program Manager drives coordination, planning, risk management, communication, escalation and execution tracking across the engagement.
FDEs kick off this phase by running an onboarding session for the customer engineering team to ensure that local development setup is seamless. FDEs should then act as a leader or member of their engineering team to break out the work in the agents’ technical spec into tickets that are picked up by both the FDE and customer’s engineers.
One particular item to look out for are red tape and restrictions around cloud deployments. Since our customers are often regulated industries, we might need to work with VDIs and artifact repositories instead of our native Github tooling. It should be a priority to determine the path to deploying the agents once code complete.
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Customer onboarding session
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Engagement status updates and feedback to the Product team about issues or unmet needs
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Working agent deployed onto the product, integrated into the customer’s cloud infrastructure
Readout and closeout of engagement
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Confirm long-term ownership of the agent
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Ensure the customer has a roadmap for continued usage and development
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Identify opportunities for future paid FDE engagement support where appropriate
Once the agent fulfills the initial engagement requirements, the team should prepare an engagement readout that demonstrates what was built, what business value was created, and what path exists for continued investment and adoption.
By the end of this phase, the customer should be positioned to continue development of the agent independently and to provide ongoing product feedback to MongoDB. Where appropriate, MongoDB may continue to support the customer through additional phases of the project.
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MongoDB-internal perspective on future FDE engagement opportunities