Structured discovery begins by eliciting constraints from the people who own the business outcome, operate the process, manage risk, and will use or support the deployed system. Stakeholder workshops in Option A identify measurable expectations concerning accuracy, latency, throughput, cost, privacy, compliance, escalation, and acceptable failure behavior before the solution is scoped.

Option D converts those expectations into production gates. Success criteria must be explicit enough to evaluate empirically, while failure thresholds must determine when the design requires remediation, human review, or rejection. Anthropic’s evaluation guidance states that successful LLM applications begin with defined success criteria and evaluations that measure performance against them. It characterizes strong criteria as specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant. Define Success Criteria and Build Evaluations

Option B prematurely selects a model before the workload profile is known. Option C can supplement discovery, but reaction-driven prototyping cannot replace documented requirements and acceptance criteria. Option E postpones essential constraints until architectural commitments may already have been made.

The discovery output should create traceability from stakeholder objectives to requirements, evaluation metrics, architecture decisions, and deployment gates.

Study Guide references/topics: Structured discovery; stakeholder workshops; nonfunctional requirements; success criteria; failure thresholds; production readiness gates.

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