Lesson 04 · Sales & delivery
Sell a first step you can finish
A paid pilot should answer a decision. Define one process, a group of users, the information you can use and the actions allowed. Agree the baseline, fee and evidence needed for a wider deployment. The customer can then make a manageable first commitment, and the partner has a clear piece of work to price.
Choose representative questions and expected answers before testing. Include missing information, older versions and requests that cross access boundaries. For a shipment assistant, showing another customer’s record may be more serious than failing to answer a question. The consequences of an error determine which failures stop rollout.
Measure the complete task. Time spent checking, correcting and handling exceptions belongs in the result. If a system produces a draft quickly but moves work into a review queue, the whole task may not have improved. Record the tested configuration and known limits. A successful pilot describes that setup and those conditions; it does not prove that every future version will work.
Check your reasoning.
Choose one answer for each question. You can retry; the explanation is part of the lesson.
Open the answer key
1. Representative tasks meet agreed criteria, including important failure cases.
Acceptance needs task-specific evidence. A polished demonstration or general benchmark cannot establish the customer’s required outcome.
2. The complete task, including review, correction and exceptions.
Task-level effort is what the customer and partner must fund. Moving work to another person does not remove its cost.