FPT had an eight-week consulting engagement with a Fortune 500 US retailer: root cause analysis on a new data warehouse, plus recommendations. Three weeks in, the project was at risk — the team had strong engineering capabilities but lacked the data architecture expertise the engagement required. I was brought in with minimal notice.

The tech stack was unfamiliar to me (SQL Server, Azure Synapse, Informatica), but the architectural patterns were not. Data warehousing problems follow the same structural shapes regardless of vendor: ingestion bottlenecks, transformation logic that doesn’t scale, missing observability, unclear lineage. I spent the weekend mapping the client’s stack to patterns I already understood.

I restructured the engagement’s process and communication first — the team needed a plan instead of ad-hoc firefighting — then took ownership of three of the five recommendation areas (data cataloging, data lake transparency, observability) and worked them in parallel. The other half of the job was organizational: I sat between the corporate stakeholders and the delivery team for the rest of the engagement, absorbing the pressure so the team could focus on the client’s actual problems. The engagement went from at-risk to a plan the client backed, and the turnaround earned FPT a seven-figure follow-on engagement.