Most teams spend months in experimentation without shipping. This guide is a forcing function — a 30-day sprint to get a real agent handling real workloads in production. We will skip the theory and focus on the decisions, tools, and gotchas that determine whether your agent actually ships.
Week 1: Define the Task and Success Criteria
The single biggest mistake teams make is starting with the model instead of the task. Spend week one mapping the exact workflow you want to automate, identifying where human judgment is genuinely required versus where it is just habit, and defining a measurable success metric. "Works better" is not a metric. "Resolves 70% of tier-1 support tickets without human escalation" is.
Week 2: Build the Evaluation Suite
Before writing a single line of agent code, build 50 representative test cases. This is non-negotiable. Your eval suite is what separates teams that ship from teams that demo. Use real production data where possible, include edge cases and adversarial inputs, and automate scoring so you can run evals in CI/CD.