The FDE customer role-play script

Purpose

This interview simulates the first real working session with a new customer. It tests whether the candidate can run discovery, scope a first deliverable, push back when needed, and re-plan when something changes. It maps to all four dimensions of our FDE interview scorecard.

It borrows from:

• Solutions engineering discovery role plays: the candidate gets minimal information up front, and the role-player reveals facts only when the right question is asked.
• Consulting case interviews: mixing candidate-led discovery with interviewer-led prompts at set points.
• Palantir-style decomposition: a vague, real-world customer problem, broken into parts, ending in a buildable first version.
• Cross-functional role plays: a second stakeholder with a competing priority to create real tension.

Who is in the room

• Interviewer A (“the customer”): plays Dana Whitfield, Director of Operations. Runs the role play.
• Interviewer B (“the VP”): joins at minute 22 as Marcus Hale, VP Finance. Stays quiet before that and takes notes. If you only have one interviewer, A plays both and announces the switch (“Marcus just joined the call”).

Both interviewers fill in the scorecard independently afterward.

Timing

Minutes	Phase	Led by
0 to 3	Setup and framing	Interviewer
3 to 18	Discovery	Candidate
18 to 22	First proposal	Candidate
22 to 32	The twist: VP joins	Interviewer, then candidate
32 to 38	Re-plan and close	Candidate
38 to 45	Out of role: debrief questions	Interviewer

Candidate brief (send 24 hours before)

Subject: Your customer session tomorrow

Tomorrow you will spend about 35 minutes in a role play with a customer, followed by about 7 minutes of normal conversation with us.

The setup. You are a Forward Deployed Engineer at Relay, a company that sells a platform for automating back-office operations work. Relay has just signed a contract with Northfield Supply, a regional distributor of industrial parts (about 900 employees, 6 warehouses). This is your first working session with their team.

What we know from the sales team: Northfield’s accounts payable team is “drowning in invoices” and wants to use Relay to cut the manual work. That is about all the notes say.

Your goal for the session: understand the problem well enough to propose a first thing you would build and ship in the next 3 to 4 weeks.

What to expect. One of us will play the customer. Treat it like a real call. Ask whatever you would ask in real life. There are things the customer knows that are not in this brief, and they will tell you if you ask. You can share a screen, use a whiteboard, or just talk. No code is required, but you can sketch if it helps.

You do not need to prepare anything beyond thinking about how you would run a first customer session. There is no trick and no single right answer.

The customer persona

Company: Northfield Supply. Regional distributor of industrial parts and MRO supplies. About 900 employees, 6 warehouses across the Midwest, roughly $400M revenue. Family-owned, 40 years old, recently brought in a new CFO who is pushing “modernization”.

Person: Dana Whitfield, Director of Operations (AP reports to her). 11 years at Northfield. Practical, busy, friendly but a little guarded. Has seen two previous software projects fail (“we bought a tool in 2022, nobody uses it”).

Dana’s goals

• Get her AP team of 7 out of overtime. They have worked Saturdays for 3 months.
• Stop paying late fees and missing early-payment discounts.
• Show the new CFO a quick win.

Dana’s constraints

• IT is two people, and they are stretched thin. Any access request takes 1 to 2 weeks.
• The ERP is an older on-prem system (Epicor, heavily customized). Nobody wants to touch it.
• Her team is not technical and is nervous about “AI taking their jobs”.

Personality notes for the role-player

• Answers the question asked, briefly. Expands only if asked a good follow-up.
• Uses vague words first (“a lot”, “most of them”, “pretty messy”). Gives the real number on the second ask.
• Warms up noticeably if the candidate asks about her team or how the work actually gets done.
• Gets slightly impatient if the candidate talks about technology for more than a minute without connecting it to her problem.

Hidden facts (reveal only when asked)

The role-player should not volunteer these. Reveal each one only if the candidate asks a question that reasonably leads to it. Track which ones were found.

#	Fact	Asked about…	Why it matters
H1	About 4,000 invoices a month. Roughly 60% arrive as PDF email attachments, 25% through a supplier portal as CSV, 15% on paper (scanned).	Volume, formats, how invoices arrive	Determines what to build first. PDFs by email is the obvious starting point.
H2	The 3 largest suppliers make up 45% of invoice volume, and all three send consistent PDF layouts.	Which suppliers, concentration, variety	A narrow first version can cover nearly half the volume.
H3	The real bottleneck is not data entry. It is matching invoices to purchase orders and receiving records. About 30% of invoices have a mismatch (quantity, price, or missing receipt) that someone has to chase by email.	Where time actually goes, walk me through a day	The stated problem (“too many invoices”) is not the real problem (“exceptions”). Strong candidates find this.
H4	Warehouse receiving records are entered late, sometimes 3 to 5 days after goods arrive, so many “mismatches” are just timing.	Why mismatches happen, receiving process	Some exceptions can be solved by waiting and re-checking, not by humans.
H5	Late fees ran about $38,000 last year, and they missed about $120,000 in early-payment discounts.	Cost, impact, how they measure success	Gives a dollar value and a success metric.
H6	Approvals over $10,000 need a sign-off from finance, which happens by forwarding emails.	Approval process, who else is involved	Hints at the VP who will join.
H7	The ERP has a read-only reporting database IT can grant access to in about a week. Write access to the ERP would take months and a vendor.	Systems, access, how to get data in and out	Read access is realistic; writing back is not. A good plan works around this.
H8	Two AP team members are excellent at knowing which supplier quirks cause problems. One is retiring in 4 months.	The team, who knows the most	Knowledge capture matters and the team should be involved, not replaced.

The twist (minute 22)

At minute 22, after the candidate has made a first proposal, Marcus Hale, VP Finance, joins the call.

Marcus’s persona: Reports to the new CFO. Sharp, skeptical, short on time. Was not involved in buying Relay and is not sure it was a good idea. Cares about controls, audit, and cost.

What Marcus brings (deliver in this order, roughly 2 minutes apart, reacting to what the candidate says):

1. Skepticism: “Sorry I’m late. I’ll be honest, I’m not sold on this. We tried automation before. Why is this different?”
2. Scope creep: “If we’re doing this, I want the whole AP process automated, including approvals, and I want it live by end of quarter.” (End of quarter is 6 weeks away.)
3. A new constraint: “And our auditors flagged last year that we don’t have a clean trail on who approved what. Whatever you build cannot make that worse. Ideally it fixes it.”

What the role-player wants to see: the candidate takes Marcus seriously, does not cave to “everything in 6 weeks”, explains a phased plan in business terms, and folds the audit requirement into the plan instead of ignoring it.

If the candidate caves completely (agrees to everything by end of quarter), Marcus should probe once: “So you’re confident all of that is live in six weeks?” Give them one chance to correct.

If the candidate argues or gets defensive, Marcus should get slightly more skeptical, not hostile. Give them room to recover.

Interviewer lines by phase

Phase 1: Setup and framing (0 to 3)

Out of role, briefly:

“Thanks for joining. For the next 35 minutes or so I’ll play Dana from Northfield. Treat it as a real call. I’ll step out of character at the end and we’ll talk normally for a few minutes. Ready?”

In role:

“Hi, I’m Dana, I run operations here, AP reports to me. Thanks for making time. I’ve got about half an hour. Sales told me you’re the person who actually builds things, so, where do you want to start?”

Listen for (Discovery): Does the candidate frame the session? A strong opener states the goal of the call and checks it (“By the end I’d like to agree on one thing we can ship in the next few weeks. Does that work?”).

Phase 2: Discovery (3 to 18)

Candidate leads. Dana answers according to the persona and hidden facts.

Standard Dana responses to common opening questions:

• “What’s the problem?” → “We’re drowning in invoices. My team’s been working Saturdays for three months.”
• “How many invoices?” → “A lot. Thousands a month.” (Second ask: “About four thousand.”)
• “What takes the most time?” → “Just getting through them all.” (If they ask to walk through a day or ask what happens after entry, reveal H3.)
• “What systems do you use?” → “Epicor. It’s old. Please don’t tell me we need to replace it.” (If they ask about access or data, reveal H7.)
• “What does success look like?” → “My team goes home on Friday and stays home.” (If they ask about cost or metrics, reveal H5.)

If the candidate goes more than 3 minutes talking about technology without asking anything, Dana says:

“Sorry, I’m not sure how that helps my team yet. Can you say what that would mean for them?”

At minute 15, if the candidate has not summarized, Dana prompts:

“Okay, I’ve told you a lot. What are you hearing?”

Listen for:

• Discovery: questions about the user and workflow before solutions; following up on vague answers; how many of H1 to H8 they find (Solid is usually 4 to 5, Strong is 6+, including H3); a summary checked with Dana.
• Build: early instincts on data sources and formats; whether they think about access (H7) before designing.

Phase 3: First proposal (18 to 22)

Dana asks:

“So what would you build first? I need something I can show my CFO in a month.”

Let the candidate propose without interruption. Then ask one follow-up:

“What would you need from us to make that happen?”

Listen for:

• Build: Is the first version small and valuable (for example, PDF invoice extraction and automated PO matching for the top 3 suppliers, read-only ERP access, exceptions routed to the team)? Do they name data sources, access, and how it fails?
• Discovery: Does the proposal reflect what they learned, especially H3 (exceptions are the real problem)?
• Pushback (light): Do they set realistic expectations about the month timeline and the IT access lead time?

Phase 4: The twist (22 to 32)

Interviewer B (or A, announcing the switch) plays Marcus. Deliver the three beats in Section C7, reacting naturally to the candidate.

Optional follow-up lines for Marcus:

• “What’s the risk if this goes wrong?”
• “Why not just hire two more AP clerks?”
• “Who on my side has to do work for this?”

Dana stays mostly quiet but can add one line if useful:

“Marcus, just so you know, the approvals piece is where most of my team’s email time goes too.”

Listen for:

• Pushback: Does the candidate decline the 6-week full-scope ask clearly and respectfully, with a reason tied to Northfield’s interests (risk, IT access, audit)? Do they offer a phased plan instead of a flat no?
• Shipping Under Pressure: Do they absorb the audit requirement and adjust the plan? Do they stay composed when Marcus is skeptical?
• Discovery: Do they ask Marcus questions (what the auditors flagged, what end of quarter means to him) instead of only defending?

Phase 5: Re-plan and close (32 to 38)

Dana:

“Okay. We’re almost out of time. Where does that leave us?”

Listen for:

• Shipping Under Pressure: A clear, revised plan. Phase 1 in 3 to 4 weeks that both Dana and Marcus can agree to, with what is in, what is out, and what comes next. Audit trail built in from day one (for example, every automated match and every human decision logged).
• Build: The revised plan is still realistic and still buildable.
• Close: Ends with concrete next steps: who requests ERP read access, who joins a working session, when they meet next.

Phase 6: Out of role, debrief (38 to 45)

“Let’s step out of the role play. Thanks, that was helpful. A few questions.”

Debrief questions (ask 3 to 4)

1. “If you had 10 more minutes with Dana, what would you have asked?”
2. “What do you think the real problem at Northfield is?” (Tests whether they found H3 and can name it.)
3. “When Marcus asked for everything by end of quarter, what was going through your head?”
4. “What is the biggest risk in your phase 1 plan, and how would you find out early if it is going wrong?”
5. “What would you tell our product team after this first session?”
6. “Was there a moment you would do differently?”

Listen for: honest self-assessment, the ability to name what they missed, and whether their reflection matches what actually happened. A candidate who says “I think I talked too much in the first ten minutes” when they did is showing exactly the self-awareness you want.

Mapping to the scorecard

Dimension	Main evidence from this role play
Build	First proposal (Phase 3), re-plan (Phase 5): is it small, concrete, buildable, aware of access and failure modes?
Discovery	Phase 2: hidden facts found, follow-up quality, summary; also questions asked of Marcus in Phase 4.
Pushback	Phase 4: handling the full-scope, 6-week ask and the skepticism; also expectation-setting with Dana in Phase 3.
Shipping Under Pressure	Phases 4 and 5: absorbing the audit constraint, re-scoping with clear cuts, composure, concrete next steps.

Interviewer checklist after the session

• Hidden facts found: H1 / H2 / H3 / H4 / H5 / H6 / H7 / H8
• Did they summarize back to Dana? Y / N
• Did they decline the 6-week full scope? Y / N / Partially
• Did they include the audit trail in the re-plan? Y / N
• Did they end with named next steps and a date? Y / N
• Score each scorecard dimension you own (1 to 4) with one piece of evidence each, before talking to the other interviewer.