What questions would you ask in a discovery session before designing an enterprise data architecture on Salesforce?

I try to surface the constraints that are expensive to discover late:

1. Volume and growth: Current record counts per object and projected growth over three to five years. This determines whether LDV design is optional or mandatory.
2. Systems of record: Which system is authoritative for each entity and each attribute, and which direction data flows. Ambiguity here becomes an MDM problem later.
3. Access and sharing: Who must see what, and who must not. Sharing requirements shape the model as much as the entities do, and a private model with a deep hierarchy has real performance consequences.
4. Licensing: Which user populations touch which objects, and what licences they hold. Discovering that a population cannot access Opportunity is much cheaper before the model is built.
5. Regulatory obligations: Retention periods, data residency, GDPR or sector-specific requirements, and legal hold processes.
6. Integration estate: What integrates today, at what frequency and volume, and what assumptions those integrations make about the model.
7. Reporting and analytics: What must be reported in Salesforce versus in a warehouse. This is the single question that most often decides virtualise versus replicate.
8. Governance capacity: Who owns data quality, and do they have time allocated. A design that assumes stewardship that does not exist will fail regardless of its technical merit.