Getting Started with Context Engineering
This playbook provides a systematic approach to building and maintaining effective context for your analytics agent. Follow these steps in order to ensure a solid foundation and scalable growth.
First POC on small, reliable context
Step 1: Add Your Data Context
Start with a restricted perimeter of your data warehouse:
- Maximum 20 tables to begin with
- Focus on clean, gold, or mart layer tables (avoid raw staging tables)
- Choose tables that represent core business domains
Starting small helps you validate your approach before scaling. You can always add more tables later.
Step 2: Add Your Documentation Repository
Include your documentation sources in context:
- dbt documentation (schema.yml, docs blocks)
- Semantic layer definitions
- Any other relevant documentation repositories
This helps the agent understand business logic, relationships, and data lineage.
Step 3: Add Company and Domain Rules
Create rules that provide context on:
- Your company - business context, terminology, conventions
- Different domains covered by your 20 tables - e.g., sales, marketing, finance, operations
These high-level rules set the foundation for domain-specific understanding.
Step 4: Add Sub-Rules for Each Sub-Domain
For each sub-domain covered, create detailed sub-rules that include:
- Business definitions - what key terms mean in your organization
- Metrics definitions - how metrics are calculated and used
- List of tables - which tables belong to this domain
- Relevant docs yaml - specific documentation for this domain
This modular approach makes your context easier to maintain and scale.
Measure, test and iterate
Step 5: Create a Set of 20 Key Questions
Develop a test suite of 20 key questions that represent:
- Common user queries
- Critical business questions
- Edge cases
- Different complexity levels
These questions will serve as your quality benchmark throughout the process.
Step 6: Test and Iterate
Test the chat on your 20 questions:
- Run all questions through the agent
- Verify answers are correct and complete
- Identify gaps in context or understanding
- Iterate on context - add missing information, clarify ambiguities, refine rules
Repeat until all 20 questions are answered correctly.
Step 7: Roll Out to Users
Once your test suite passes:
- Roll out to a small group of users initially
- Track usage - monitor what questions users are asking
- Monitor real-life performance using logs of questions and feedback
- Collect user feedback to identify improvement areas
Step 8: Version Control and Quality Assurance
Maintain context quality over time:
- Version your context using git repositories
- Run
dazense test frequently (e.g., weekly or after major changes)
- Ensure context quality doesn’t drift as you make updates
- Set up automated tests in CI/CD pipelines
- Track test results over time to monitor performance trends
Scale
Step 9: Scale Gradually
As adoption grows:
- Extend the number of datasets available in the agent
- Make documentation and rules modular to support scalability
- Add new domains incrementally, following the same process
- Maintain the same quality standards as you expand