📋 Purpose

This playbook contains technical discovery questions that Account Managers can ask during customer conversations to gather information that will help Solutions Architects prepare for engagements. These questions bridge the gap between business conversations and technical deep-dives.

1

Current Technical Landscape

Understanding where they are today

  • What cloud provider(s) are you currently using? What percentage is on each?
  • Do you have an AWS account already? How long have you been using it?
  • What's your approximate monthly cloud spend?
  • Who on your team makes technical/architecture decisions? (CTO, VP Eng, Lead Architect?)
  • How big is your engineering team?
2

Tech Stack & Architecture Basics

High-level technical context for SA prep

  • What programming languages and frameworks does your team use?
  • Are you running on containers, serverless, or traditional VMs?
  • What databases are you using? (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, etc.)
  • Are you using Kubernetes? If so, managed (EKS) or self-managed?
  • Do you have a microservices architecture or monolith?
3

Infrastructure & DevOps Maturity

Understanding their operational readiness

  • Do you use Infrastructure as Code? (Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation?)
  • What does your CI/CD pipeline look like? (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI?)
  • How often do you deploy to production?
  • Do you have separate environments? (Dev, staging, prod?)
  • How do you handle monitoring and alerting today?
4

Scale & Performance Needs

Sizing the opportunity and technical requirements

  • What's your current user base / traffic volume?
  • What scale are you planning for in the next 12-18 months?
  • Have you experienced any scaling challenges or outages?
  • Do you have specific latency requirements? (Real-time, sub-second, etc.)
  • Do you need to operate in multiple regions?
5

Security & Compliance Requirements

Critical for SA to know before any architecture discussion

  • Do you have any compliance requirements? (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR?)
  • Are you currently certified or working toward certification?
  • Do you handle sensitive data? (PII, PHI, financial data?)
  • Do your customers have specific security requirements in contracts?
  • Do you have a dedicated security team or person?
6

Data & Analytics

Understanding data workloads

  • How much data are you storing/processing?
  • Do you have a data warehouse or data lake?
  • Are you doing real-time analytics or batch processing?
  • Do you have any ML/AI workloads or plans?
  • What's your data retention policy?
7

Specific Technical Challenges

Direct input for SA engagement planning

  • What are your biggest technical pain points right now?
  • Are there any projects or migrations you're planning?
  • What would you want to get out of a technical deep-dive with our SA?
  • Are there specific AWS services you're interested in learning about?
  • What's blocking you from moving faster technically?
8

Domain-Specific Questions

Ask based on the startup's vertical

☁️ If SaaS / B2B:

  • Is your product single-tenant or multi-tenant?
  • Do customers require data residency or dedicated infrastructure?

💳 If FinTech:

  • Are you PCI-DSS compliant or working toward it?
  • What are your uptime/availability requirements?

🏥 If HealthTech:

  • Are you handling PHI? Do you need HIPAA compliance?
  • Do you have BAA requirements?

🤖 If AI/ML:

  • Are you training models or using pre-trained/foundation models?
  • What GPU/compute requirements do you have?
  • Are you interested in Amazon Bedrock?

🎮 If Gaming/Real-time:

  • What are your latency requirements?
  • How do you handle concurrent users at peak?

⭐ Quick Reference: Top 10 Questions for AMs

If you only have time for a few questions, prioritize these:

  1. What cloud provider(s) are you using and what's your monthly spend?
  2. What's your tech stack? (Languages, databases, containers/serverless?)
  3. Do you have any compliance requirements? (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI?)
  4. What's your current scale and where do you need to be in 12-18 months?
  5. Are you using Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD?
  6. What are your biggest technical pain points?
  7. Who makes technical decisions on your team?
  8. Are there specific AWS services you want to explore?
  9. Do you have multi-region or latency requirements?
  10. What would you want from a technical deep-dive with our SA?