Forward Deployed Engineer
also referred to as: fde · forward deployed engineers
16 statements across 3 episodes · 10 bullish · 2 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jan 31, 2025 by Garry Tan · across every show →
Everything said about Forward Deployed Engineer, oldest first
Jan 31, 2025 positive
May 30, 2025 positive
Sep 8, 2025 negative
McGrew: Startups should avoid FDE strategy unless no alternative works
“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…”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: FDE deployments start at negative margins before becoming profitable
“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…”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
Sep 8, 2025 neutral
Sep 8, 2025
McGrew: FDEs function as product discovery linking client needs to platforms
“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…”
Sep 8, 2025 negative
McGrew: Bringing one-off FDE solutions directly into core products causes over-specialization
“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…”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: Platform teams must treat internal FDEs as their key customers
“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…”
Sep 8, 2025
McGrew: Startups that can scale with identical customer setups should avoid FDEs
“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.”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: FDE strategy succeeds by growing contract sizes rather than cutting customization
“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…”
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: Palantir's FDE model relied on Echo analysts and Delta engineers
“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 …”
Sep 8, 2025 bullish
Sep 8, 2025 positive
Sep 8, 2025 positive
McGrew: FDE-led product discovery beats traditional sales-led discovery
“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.”
Sep 8, 2025
McGrew: Forward deployed engineers must be rapid prototypers, not code craftsmen
“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…”