Many useful requirements do not begin in a meeting.
Before the factory reporting project, nobody asked for a new system. More than one hundred workers kept reporting through WeChat groups, while two clerks manually counted, checked and consolidated the records. The work still got done every day, so it was easy to treat the process as normal.
I did not see a missing reporting page. I saw the same production data being rebuilt by hand every day, without one dependable view for operations, management and finance.
I look at three things first
Is the work persistently repeated?
An occasional inconvenience may not justify a system. Daily repetition, multiple people doing the same consolidation and frequent checking are stronger signals that the problem has become an operating cost.
Does the data have a job after collection?
If the result only fills one report, the value of automation may be limited. In this case, the same data basis later extended into daily output, machine capacity, exception tracking and finance-required reporting. Stabilising the first step could therefore reduce repeated work downstream.
Will the change create more work for the frontline?
A technically neat solution that people resist is not a successful delivery. Workers already used WeChat, so I kept that entry point. In the current version, an operator triggers the Codex workflow, which then collects, parses, cleans, reviews and aggregates the messages.
Communication is not more meetings
Operations needed clear reporting and exception rules. Finance needed a dependable counting basis. Engineering needed an explicit input, process and output. My role was to clarify each view, turn it into named decisions, and keep following up until the open points were closed.
People rarely support a change simply because someone presents a solution. They need to understand why the change is worthwhile, what friction it removes and what they are expected to do. Lowering that coordination cost is part of the delivery.
FDE work often begins before the requirement document
To me, forward deployed engineering is not only fast implementation after a requirement arrives. It is also entering the field, noticing the problem nobody has named, weighing business value against adoption cost, and organising the people needed to move it forward.
Read the factory reporting case, or start with a focused field review if your team has a workflow that depends on repeated manual consolidation.