Announcing FDEverything!

A new newsletter about all things FDE.

The term “forward-deployed engineering” is increasingly a) popular and b) confusing.

A. Popular because seemingly all the hot startups are hiring forward-deployed engineers (FDEs). Some people are even calling it the critical key to the AI industry’s success.

B. Confusing because I am not sure many people actually know what FDEs do (or why they may be important).

To the best of my knowledge, the term “forward deployed engineering” was actually first used 10+ years ago at Palantir. It was a deliberate strategy Palantir used to solve problems for customers, and perhaps played a big role in their now giant success story (~$300 billion company at the time of writing this).

I know because I was lucky enough to start my career at Palantir. At the time, FDE seemed like a foreign idea. You would take fully-fledged software engineers, bring them onsite to the customer, have them deeply understand the customer’s way of working and the key problem to solve, then build something totally new to solve the problem. There was no product management. There was no design. Your job was just to get the problem solved. And you would do it by any means necessary.

In the early days at Palantir, there was no platform. There was no mechanism by which you could have leverage from one customer to the next one. We would rebuild the same sort of thing over and over and over. The life of an FDE was the life of pain. You would live out of hotel rooms, work a full day at the customer site, then come back and work late into the evening to get a product built, then show up the next day and get feedback. Repeat ad nauseam.

Eventually, just to save ourselves time, we started building products we could reuse from place to place. And after years of such iteration, we realized we’d been building the platform we needed all along.

In the end, Palantir’s platform became a foundation for their huge success across Fortune 500 companies, major Western governments, non-profits and more.

Inspired by Palantir, the FDE job title has spread to applied AI companies like Cursor and Harvey, to legacy companies like Salesforce and Oracle, to AI-native services firms that are building within verticals, and to PE firms that are looking to revamp how their companies work.

They’re all trying to do what Palantir did, and many of them are using the same tactic: use a forward-deployed engineering team, have them sit deeply with the customer and understand their problems, then build what’s missing.

But so far, there hasn’t been a great place to gather learning across FDEs. I’m now running an FDE team at an applied AI company, and there’s no clear playbook. Every week, I hear from AI companies trying to speed up their time to implementation, or trying to construct an FDE team, or trying to figure out how the FDE should contribute back to platform, or trying to understand the cost structure and revenue model for FDEs.

If the current zeitgeist is any indication, forward deployed engineering is here to stay. So we’re here to figure out the secrets, the new ideas, the ways of approaching it so that you can do your job better, whether that’s in a forward deployed role or if you think the learnings from FDE would be useful in your day to day.

Our aim is not to be prescriptive - FDEs now come in all shapes and sizes, from people who’ve never done software engineering before, to veteran staff engineers looking to understand their customer’s problems. We simply want to understand the stories of individual FDEs and FDE teams, as they go about bringing change for their customers and organizations. If you’re interested in a forward deployed role, or are excited to build a team at your company, or simply want to take the learnings from how FDE works into your own job, this is the place for you. Along the way, we’ll feature companies that are growing incredibly quickly using their FDE teams, and show how you can do the same.

Some things that we’re going to be highlighting as part of the FDE community include:

1. Interviews with prominent forward-deployed engineers and heads of FDE at various up-and-coming and successful companies.

2. Discussions about the meta of forward-deployed engineering: how do various companies think about it, how do they approach it, and how do they reconcile the FDE approach with the standard vanilla SaaS approach for go-to-market and engineering?

3. Roundups of what we see across the FDE community, what teams are hiring, and observations we have about how the industry is changing.

Thanks for reading! Email me (sanjay@fdeverything.com) if you have any ideas or feedback. I’m especially interested in knowing how I can be most helpful.