CEO wants to skip product discovery before development bc sales already signed the deal
Sales closed a large shipper last month and the contract mentions automated load tendering. Our CEO's position is that discovery is pointless now, the deal is signed, just build it. He's given engineering 6 weeks.
I pushed back a little and got 3 calls with the shipper's dispatch team, framed as kickoff calls so nobody felt slowed down. What came out of it: their dispatchers re-key most tenders by hand from email bc their EDI setup only covers their top carrier, and the long tail of small carriers they use every day just send emails and PDFs.
The feature as written in the contract assumes clean EDI data from everyone. If we build that, it'll technically meet the contract and their dispatchers will keep re-keying anyway.
So now I'm stuck between the contract says X and X won't get used. The CEO hears discovery and thinks about months of research. I think we need maybe 2 more weeks, a rough mockup of the email intake flow and one session with their dispatchers walking through it.
How have you made the case for discovery when the deal is already done? Is there a version of this that doesn't sound like I'm trying to slow down revenue?