"Field Work" Articles (7)

FDEs and Business Ethnography | Turning What a Workplace Takes for Granted into Product

Observation methods capture what people do. Ethnography captures why, in that group, it is taken for granted. The third article in our FDE practice series traces how an anthropological method reached corporate workplaces by way of Xerox PARC, explains Polanyi's tacit knowledge and Nonaka's socialization, shows how to write thick description, and lays out how ethnography differs from observation and why an FDE spends weeks on site. Contract-development business analysis targets "the process"; FDE ethnography targets "what this company takes for granted" and turns what it learns into standard product features. It also covers the time-boxing and deliverables that keep this from becoming live-in contract work.

2026-09-15Ryuta Hamamoto

WARP

The Interview Skills That Make an FDE Work | How to Draw Real Insight Out of the Shop Floor

Whether a Forward Deployed Engineer succeeds is decided less by how fast they write code than by how they listen. Our engineers take interview training before they go on site, but the "form" you learn in training and the "eye for mismatch" you only develop in the field turned out to be different things. This article lays out the three kinds of FDE interviews, question design built on the critical incident technique and Toyota's five whys, silence and mirroring, working in pairs, and where AI transcription fits, in a form engineers can use as is.

2026-09-15Ryuta Hamamoto

WARP

FDEs and the KJ Method | Turning Field Fragments into Structure, and Where AI Stops

The fragments collected through interviews, observation, and ethnography cannot be used for implementation as they are. To turn fragments into structure, our engineers use the thinking behind the KJ method, which the anthropologist Jiro Kawakita created for field research. The fourth article in our FDE practice series walks through the steps, one idea per card, gathering by meaning, diagramming, and writing up, using real field notes as material. It covers the boundary between what AI does and what people keep, how this differs from requirements consolidation in contract development, and how the structured result feeds the next week's implementation. The KJ method is a registered trademark of Kawakita Research Institute, which provides formal training.

2026-09-15Ryuta Hamamoto

WARP

How FDEs Observe | Shadowing and Contextual Inquiry to Catch the Steps Nobody Explains

Interviews get you half of how work is actually done. The other half sits in steps the people doing the work cannot explain, and only observation catches it. The second article in our FDE practice series lays out three observation methods, shadowing, contextual inquiry, and think-aloud, down to when to use each, where to sit, what to watch, and what to write. It covers Taiichi Ohno's chalk circle, how to handle the Hawthorne effect, how FDE observation differs from the as-is analysis in contract development, the FDE habit of putting a working artifact down the day after observing, and four patterns we keep finding on shop floors.

2026-09-15Ryuta Hamamoto

WARP

An FDE's Week | From Code on Day One to Returning the Learning to the Product on Friday

When we say we can implement faster than anyone, the basis is not fast hands but the fact that the loop of asking, building, reading the reaction, and returning the learning to the product fits inside one week. The seventh article in our FDE practice series lays out that week concretely: Monday's diagnostic and first version, Tuesday to Thursday's observation and daily versions, Friday's KJ session, dictionary update, and pattern-or-branch decision, placing the six skills from the earlier articles into it. It also covers how the weeks stack inside a 45-to-90-day time box until the person on site edits the dictionary and we are no longer needed, how this differs from contract-development phases, and, honestly, what does not reach production in a week.

2026-09-15Ryuta Hamamoto

WARP

How an FDE Builds an Ontology from Field Notes | A Dictionary of Nouns and Verbs an AI Can Traverse

The dictionary of a company's nouns and verbs gathered through interviews, observation, ethnography, the KJ method, and video analysis is not usable by an AI agent as a dictionary. The sixth article in our FDE practice series explains how to extract five things from transcripts and observation records, nouns, verbs, relationships, states, and exceptions, and turn them into a structure of meaning an AI can traverse: an ontology. It covers the definition, why Palantir put it at the center of its product, its use in GraphRAG, the boundary between AI extraction and human meaning-making, and how it differs from data modeling in contract development. Putting ownership of the dictionary on the customer's side is the condition for the customer to run on their own.

2026-09-15Ryuta Hamamoto

WARP

How to Develop FDEs | Training and Evaluation Through Which Engineers Learn Field Skills

The final article in our FDE practice series is about developing FDEs. Coding is in the curriculum; asking, watching, being there, structuring, filming, and handing a dictionary to a machine are written down nowhere. Our engineers took external interview training before going on site and built their field skills through daily routines: working in pairs, the unease column, Friday groups, dictionary versions. Drawing on the books Palantir handed new hires, a16z's eight-week fellowship, and Nonaka's socialization, this article covers what training can teach, what only the field teaches, and an evaluation design based on patterns returned and declining on-site hours rather than billable utilization.

2026-09-15Ryuta Hamamoto