FDE Times: Project close-out — sort every loose end into lessons, remaining debt, or product issues
A 5 November FDE Times guide, drawing on PostHog’s handbook and Google SRE postmortem culture, gives FDEs a close-out meeting template: filter commercial asks to the CSM/TAM first, put every other item in exactly one of three buckets with a named owner and priority, and store the write-up where the next engagement will find it.
The last week of a deployment is crowded with handovers and access revocation, so the close-out review often shrinks to a half-hour of “everything’s fine.” A 5 November FDE Times guide argues that meeting is the one time the right people are in the room to turn field friction into owned work before the knowledge leaves with the FDE.
Everything still open belongs in exactly one bucket. Lessons change how the team works next time. Remaining debt is work the customer or the FDE team still owns, with a person and a deadline. Product issues are problems only the product team can fix—and PostHog’s rule is to hand those over rather than hack around them, so bespoke patches do not become the product. Commercial requests for extra scope are filtered out first and passed to the CSM, TAM or TAE who owns the relationship.
The article walks through an analytics deployment example (slow warehouse sync, SDK offline drops, temporary workarounds, renaming scripts, access delays, and a custom-dashboard ask) and supplies a four-point issue template: what is broken, who hits it, what it blocks, and how to reproduce, plus a link to any workaround that must be removed after the fix.
For FDEs, a project is closed when the next customer does not pay the same price: store the review in a shared repo, prioritise actions that unblock the customer’s main report, invite the customer into the session, and introduce whoever will own the relationship after you leave.
Source: fdetimes.net