Forward Deployed Engineer

“I honestly think if you have a product that requires a hundred FDEs to get it deployed, you just have a bad product.”

“Now it seems that you're coming to a large legacy enterprise. They really want to adopt the ad because they have to, the problem is they don't know how to do it. They understand that their processes are very long. There's something that takes a year or two or …”

“If you're selling a 100,000 dollar deal and you're pulling a Ford deploy, like your economics are, it's going to get messy.”

“I think one thing that's really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but there's like forward deployed engineer, this like technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what is a, you know, c…”

“Forward deployed engineers are necessary or newly necessary for early stage AI companies because the workflows are new. Right? If you're building a SaaS company five years ago, most SaaS products are pretty well explored, right? Like you roughly know what the …”

“Once you know what the workflow is, you should not be relying on forward deployed engineers anymore, because once you know what the workflow is, If you can productize it, you should productize it and then become, you know, typical company with these scaling pr…”

“I think we're seeing now the world moving very much towards, we're looking for specific business outcomes. And that's of course where the, this FD function comes in, right? They go in on like, Hey, we're going to help you accomplish this specific outcome versu…”

“We're going to need, I think Aaron Levy said on a tweet today or the other day, we're going to need a hundred times more FDs than we thought, because there's going to be a hundred times more workflows out there and they all need humans to deploy them. They don…”

“Even when a company says they have FDs, a lot of times, a lot of them aren't up to that aren't up to the bar. They're just CS people repurposed. Or whatever the title is, they're not good enough to help you manage the agent, right?”

“If we need FDEs to make the product work, we have a shit product. Like, the point of FDEs should be accelerate and get them consuming faster. If you're putting in FDEs, because that's the only way you'll get a deal done, I'm sorry, my friend, you have a shit p…”

“We currently do, yeah. But I think that's just, that's an education thing. In five years, maybe we don't at all, to be honest.”

“The forward deployed engineer is a glorified professional services person. If you're a really good engineer, you do not want to be a forward deployed engineer. You want to work on the core product.”

“I mean, I know a lot of people that think forward deployed engineers simply make up for a shitty product. There's, and there's something to that, right? I mean, like, look, you're basically, and I won't mention companies here, but there's big companies out the…”

“I describe forward deployed engineers as people that that metabolize pain and excrete product.”

“View FDs as one of your most important assets to getting renewals, retention, NPS, word of mouth, virality. Don't look at FDs as a cost center. This was the mistake we made in customer success a generation ago. And this is why customer success was cut to zero …”

“If you have people in your org who know the product, they can be an FBE. They do not need to be an engineer as long as they know the product and can get your customer deployed. I feel like we're also losing the plot. That the whole point of the FDE is to get y…”

“FDs forward deployed engineers for the moment are a limiting factor. And let me explain what I mean. What it means is no one has enough fully trained FDs that, that can get a customer up and running fast enough. No one has enough of these resources.”

“So, so even though I am literally hiring FDs and if you're an FD, please apply for a job with me. I actually disagree with that entirely.”

“And so the like super long-term world is it's all Context to the LLM. It's all requirements. It's all standard operating procedures, which is what FDs do. It's all changing the way people of the business operate, which is an FDE job. And that's the future of s…”

“Honestly, the only thing that's different today, it's exactly the same as it's been for a hundred years, except they call their SCEs or their system consultants For deployed engineers. The rest of it is the same. I thought it would be totally different in AI. …”

“The agent will fail without training and onboarding this product. It will fail. Like it will never work. So it becomes an imperative if you want to win. Like you need, I, you, this term has been bandied about too much, but you need a team of humans. We can cal…”

“If you're building something where the hardest part is getting adoption and workflow embedding, and you need to actually change the way a company works, then yes, forward deployed engineers are the only way to do it.”

“But I think they're really a nuts and bolts software company with forward deployed engineers, That are smart, that sit with a warfighter, and solve, like, everyday problems you would in any organization, ah, as much as they do the other stuff.”

“The hottest role right now, other than AI researcher is probably forward deployed engineers who are now like in, in like go to market.”

“I think in many ways, what the forward deployed engineer role has actually replaced are the implementation consultants for large organizations, large companies like Workday and ServiceNow and Salesforce that are customizing that software to meet these organiza…”

“There is very little difference other than we expect the forward deployed engineer to be spending 20% or more of their time talking to customers.”

“The forward deployed engineer is by far the strongest hiring trend in the last 12 months.”

“These apps that need to be trained with forward deployed engineers and work. I don't think very many of them are less than 30 or 50,000 dollars a year. And a lot of them actually try to kind of have a price point that's approaching a hundred K like 60 K a year…”

“Be wary of super cheap apps. Be wary of super cheap. It's not that we're not getting there. It's not that everything isn't going to get better, but it's, you can't cut the corner on training. So if instead of 50 grand a year, you're buying a solution that's 50…”

“For the high end of the market, it works well. Palantir shows that. For the mid-market, it is not a scalable business.”

“At Pigment right now we are doing like what several AI companies are doing out there, which is hiring forward deployed engineers and people to really help with change management and deploying the models in the right way.”

“It's actually become, I think the dominant way that the AI agent startups are organizing themselves.”

“I was looking earlier today, and if you look at the YC job board, there's over a hundred YC startups that are hiring for a job with the title for deployed engineer and up from basically zero, three years ago”

“A forward deployed engineer is someone typically technical and engineer who sits at the customer site and fills the gap between what the product does and what the customer needs.”

“If you're in a business where this is working for you, That's great. Don't do the FDE strategy. You have been given an amazing gift. If you have the opportunity to just scale, treat all the customers the same, go ahead and do that.”

“What he realized we needed was for the FTEs to act as product discovery. So they would go to the site, they would take the product as it was, and they would fill the gap between what the product did and what the users needed. So, you know, the FDE goes and bui…”

“Sales-led product discovery, you're talking to people from the outside. And again, this is important very early on, but it's not as effective as the FDE-led product discovery, where you're solving these problems from the inside.”

“The two key roles are those of what we call the echo team and the Delta team. The echo team were Embedded analysts. So they would go to the customer site. They would speak to the users. They would try to figure out what demo or what use case really made sense …”

“And then for your deltas you want someone who's really good at prototyping. So the wrong profile for a Delta would be someone who's a craftsman who really loves, you know, making sure the abstractions are exactly right. That, you know, they're building softwar…”

“From a business model perspective, one of the key things that you will see, that you should see, is that it may be the case that you're, when you go into, you do a new deployment at a customer, that you're actually losing money early on. As the longer you're a…”

“There's a classic failure mode here where, you know, the FD implements something for one customer and you say, great, well, that's how you should do it. And you bring it directly into the product. And it turns out if you do that, you're building something that…”

“My first, second, and third pieces of advice to people who are thinking about trying an FDU strategy is like, don't, Don't do this at home. If you can avoid it, like it's probably bad for you. Probably you're going to end up doing services. And then only if yo…”

“Well, that's the advice that you give to an early stage founder, and the FDE model effectively is doing things that don't scale at scale.”

“In the product market fit strategy, you want to be doing less work for every customer, you want to be driving down costs, you want to keep the contract size the same. In the FTE strategy, you want to drive the contract size up. So you're doing more and more va…”

“You want to focus on, on the user experience and you have to do that, but you also have to remember your other key customer is the FDE. Your product should be, you know, ultimately delivering a good thing to the user after FDE customization, but it should be d…”

“Forward deployed engineers who Came up through that system at Palantir now. They're turning out to be some of the best founders at YC, actually.”

“You need each customer's revenue to be probably in the billions of dollars. If it's below that, you're probably not looking at a traditional forward deployed engineer motion.”

“I know that the AI labs are hiring forward deployed engineers now. They're building forward deployed engineering teams”

“The key things that made our model work were, one they were actually real engineers who could build product themselves. That's a very big difference, right? I think a lot of the time companies will say, this person's a forward-deployed engineer, but actually t…”

“I think this is a really interesting piece that you've just hit on, and I expect to see a lot more startups that take advantage of that insight.”

“The big difference, or one big difference I noticed was that they were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deployed engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way.”

“And they made every kind of forward deployed engineer read that for the simple reason that I think it just helps you Kind of read people better and interact with them better and become more conscious of how you are coming across and just modulate that.”

“We just need more software engineers who are like that forward deployed engineer to link up the intelligence and we're there.”

“The job itself for We Deploy Engineer is a super interesting job because it is kind of at this intersection of being an engineer, so a software engineer, but also still doing, like, business related things. Yeah, so part of the job was a solutions architect, p…”