Discovery and Scoping
Explore how to conduct thorough discovery in regulated banking environments to define clear rules and boundaries for loan document flagging systems. Learn to gather key details from stakeholders, address governance and compliance, and create a written scoping brief to align expectations and set project limits before design.
The Northfield brief tells us what the bank wants and the rules it operates under. It leaves open most of the details that decide the design, such as what an underwriter actually counts as an inconsistency. Finding those details is the work of discovery.
In Anthropic's FDE loop, this is exactly where discovery happens. Some loops include a customer conversation round, a live roleplay with no code editor, where interviewers play executives or skeptical architects and the candidate runs discovery. The opening minutes of the technical screen and the final panel test the same skill. Candidates who propose an architecture before understanding the problem tend to struggle in all three.
Good discovery starts with knowing what we need to find out.
What the FDE needs to learn
The brief tells us what the bank wants. It leaves open most of what we need to build it well. Before any design, we need answers in five areas.
Documents: Which document types are in scope, which formats arrive, and how often documents are missing or unreadable.
Inconsistency rules: What counts as a mismatch to an underwriter, including how much difference is acceptable.
Workflow: How underwriters receive work today, where a flag would appear, and what they do with it.
Governance: What model risk needs before a pilot, who validates the system, and what records must be kept.
Data and access: Where applicant data may be processed, who may see it, and how long it can be kept.
Each area ...