“Why is your software asking my team for information we don’t even track?” the VP snapped. We’d proudly shipped a generic workflow that was supposed to scale. It didn’t.

I called it right there: “Keep the first two questions, delete the rest. We’ll handle exceptions by hand for now.” She gave me a look that said, finally.

After that, everything shifted. Calls got shorter, the team stopped ignoring our tool, and the adoption graph bent upward. By the end of the quarter, the CFO green-lit an expansion.

The mistake was assuming the roadmap back at headquarters was more important than the reality on the ground. The fix was embedding an engineer inside their office who could delete, tweak, and rebuild until it worked.

That’s the power of the forward-deployed model: outcomes drive trust, and trust grows into bigger business.