FDEForward-deployed engineering · taking Q3 2026 engagements

We re-architect mid-market departments into production agent systems — built on your stack, owned by your team, shipped in ninety days.

90 days
From signed scope to live agent in production
≤ 8
Engineers on the bench, by design, in 2026
Three illustrative department builds · industrial finance · fintech revenue · regional CPG logistics
Capabilities

Production
evolved.

A boutique forward-deployed engineering practice. Two engagements per engineer at any time. We are the team that scopes the department, ships the production agent system, and gets paged when it fails.

Workflow auditEval rubricBlueprintScoped build

Discovery Sprint

Three weeks embedded with the team. We audit the workflow, build the eval rubric, and produce a written transformation blueprint that is yours whether or not we build.

Production-gradeYour cloudEval gatesRunbooks

Department Build

A senior forward-deployed engineer ships the agent system — instrumented for evals from day one, deployed inside your cloud, your data warehouse, your existing systems of record.

SLA on qualityDrift remediationQuarterly reviewB-O-T optional

Operate & Optimize

Continuous evals, scope expansion, quarterly performance reviews. We are the team that gets paged when production fails, until you decide to take it in-house.

Methodology

Four phases.
Ninety days.

DAS-M, our Department-as-an-Agent-System methodology. Designed for ninety-day production deployment in mid-market environments — same shape across Finance, Revenue, and Logistics Ops. No deck-delivered transformations.

i
Phase 01 · Discover

Scope a department, not a task.

Two-to-three week paid Discovery Sprint. We embed with the team, audit the workflow, build the eval rubric.

Duration · 2–3 weeksOutput · Blueprint & rubric
ii
Phase 02 · Architect

Design the system before code.

Workflows mapped to agent architecture: tools, models, eval gates, human-in-the-loop, failure recovery.

Duration · 1–2 weeksOutput · System design
iii
Phase 03 · Build

Ship to production on your stack.

A senior FDE writes the agent system, instruments it for evals from day one, deploys in your cloud.

Duration · 7–10 weeksStack · Yours — AWS, GCP, Azure
iv
Phase 04 · Operate

Stay accountable to the metrics.

Continuous evals, drift remediation, scope expansion, quarterly reviews. We get paged when it fails.

Cadence · Monthly retainerOptional · Build-Operate-Transfer
Departments

Three departments.
Three live consoles.

Each row below is an illustrative engagement — the kind of agent system we build in ninety days, calibrated to the systems and workflows of that industry. Read the case study for the engagement narrative; open the demo console to see what the system feels like running on synthetic-but-credible data.

Department 01 · Finance

Finance Ops agents.

Embedded with the finance team to map how work actually moves across AP, AR, close, treasury, and FP&A. Deployed across the existing ERP, expense, and reporting systems. No migration, no new software.

Capabilities
  • AP exception triage and resolution
  • Cross-system reconciliation
  • Close readiness tracking
  • Payment timing optimization
  • Cash position and forecasting
Department 02 · Revenue

Revenue Ops agents.

Mapped every handoff from lead intake through deal desk, forecasting, comp, and customer handoff. Deployed across the existing CRM, call recording, CLM, and enablement tools.

Capabilities
  • Deal orchestration and approval routing
  • CRM auto-enrichment
  • Forecast intelligence
  • Security questionnaire automation
  • Commission validation
Department 03 · Logistics

Logistics Ops agents.

Mapped exception flows, demand planning, procurement, and warehouse coordination. Deployed across the existing ERP, WMS, and planning systems.

Capabilities
  • Exception detection and routing
  • Demand sensing
  • Supplier scorecard unification
  • Inventory and allocation optimization
  • Quality defect pattern detection
Failure atlas

A taxonomy of failure.

Why ninety-five percent of enterprise AI pilots fail to reach production — and how we prevent each named mode.

M-01

The Demo Trap.

Ninety percent per step compounds to twelve percent end-to-end across twenty steps.

M-02

The Klarna Reversal.

Aggressive cost-cut deploy, quality drops, public walk-back, brand damage.

M-03

The Integration Surprise.

A legacy API or undocumented data dependency blows the timeline by six weeks.

M-04

The Black Box.

Production agents make a wrong call, no one can explain why, trust collapses.

M-05

The Pilot Purgatory.

A working POC, a thoughtful deck, a year of “scaling phase” with zero P&L impact.

Frequently asked

What enterprise teams
actually ask.

We do not staff a pyramid. The engineer in the discovery call is the engineer writing the code. Engagements ship in ninety days, not eighteen months. We do not bill hourly. We commit to the eval gate, not the deck.
SaaS products solve one slice of one workflow and require you to migrate onto their stack. We deploy department-scope agent systems on your existing tools (Salesforce, NetSuite, D365, SAP, Manhattan, whatever you run on) and you own the result.
Two to three weeks. Week one: workflow embed, documentation, access. Week two: opportunity prioritization, eval rubric design, technical due diligence. Week three: written blueprint, scoped Build proposal, presentation. The blueprint is yours whether or not we build.
Inside your cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure), with your model provider keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex AI — configured for zero retention). StackLane builds and operates the system; you own the code, the data, the keys. Data does not leave your environment.
Agents run inside your VPC and write to your audit log. Every action carries timestamp, source, reasoning trace, confidence, and human-approval signal. Human-in-the-loop is the default for any irreversible or high-stakes action. SOC 2 Type II is on our roadmap; for SOX-relevant deployments we operate inside your existing controls framework rather than adding a parallel one.
No. They are illustrative — clearly marked at the top of each one. They show what a 90-day Department Build delivers at a representative mid-market client. We will publish real, named case studies when founding customers ship and approve. Until then, the methodology, eval rubric, and architecture are real; the client name is a placeholder.
Three options. (1) StackLane continues to operate the system on a monthly retainer. (2) We hand off to your internal team via a Build-Operate-Transfer with knowledge-transfer milestones. (3) You take ownership immediately and we are available on a quarterly review cadence. The IP is in the methodology; the agents are yours.
Coda

Ready to scope a department?

Thirty minutes. The founder runs every initial call. We will tell you in the first ten minutes whether StackLane is the right fit. If not, we will tell you who is.