Forward Deployed Engineers

Note: This is part of the product creator series of articles, based on the overview article, The Era of the Product Creator.  This series is intended for anyone that wants to create a successful product, whether or not the person has had professional training or experience in product management, product design, or engineering.

In the previous article in this series, I discussed the new generation of gen ai based prototyping tools, and how they help in product discovery.

In this article, I’d like to talk about another important current trend, one that I’m exceptionally happy to see spreading.  This is the concept of a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE).

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, you can get a good overview in either written form, or this excellent video interview.   But essentially these are technical people (usually an engineer but increasingly other forms of product creators including product managers or designers) that embed with the target customer in order to deeply understand their environment, their problems, and what’s truly required to solve those problems and deliver the outcomes they need.

For many people, the concept of an FDE is tied very specifically to Palantir in their model of helping complex and challenging organizations to solve hard problems and deliver real outcomes (initially in domains such as defense, intelligence, and law enforcement, but later expanding to domains including aviation, healthcare, and oil and gas).

And I think this is unfortunate because the concept of an FDE applies much more broadly than just in the most challenging product situations.

This article is not about Palantir, but in order to understand the real power of FDE’s, it’s useful to understand a bit about their business.  For an excellent summary of their approach to product, especially during their early years, see this excellent article by product coach and early Palantir FDE Adam Judelson.

Historically, there have generally been two types of software companies.  Those that build products (designed to be used by many customers), and those that build custom solutions (designed to be used by a specific customer).

It’s no secret to anyone that reads these articles that my focus is product companies, and to be clear, despite so many people thinking Palantir is a consulting / custom solutions company, I absolutely consider Palantir a product company.  However, before we get to that, let’s look at conventional custom solutions companies.

The primary custom solutions company for many years has been Accenture.  They have built a very large and enduring business by engaging directly with clients, and then building what these clients request. The client provides the spec, they agree on a price, and Accenture builds what’s requested.

Of course, in that model, Accenture can’t really sign up to deliver an outcome, because the solution is being dictated to them.

Many of those clients blame Accenture when the solutions don’t deliver the results they had hoped for, but most of you know all too well that is rarely the real problem.

But what if a client is enlightened enough to know that this approach is unlikely to give them the outcomes they desire?

Then they can either try to build the competencies they need in-house, or they can try to find a partner they trust that will sign up for an outcome.

Enter Palantir.  What Palantir did was apply the product model to custom solutions.  They essentially bet on themselves being able to solve the customer’s problem, in a way that created value for the customer, but also for Palantir’s product offerings.  

When Palantir succeeds in delivering an important outcome for a client, they know this is exceptionally valuable (as of this writing, Palantir is worth more than $400B, compared to Accenture’s $150B).

But this means Palantir needs direct access to the client’s different types of users, stakeholders, and data in order to deeply understand the problem, and discover and deliver a solution that delivers the necessary outcome.

And for deeply technical products (which includes virtually all intelligent/AI products today and nearly everything Palantir takes on), they know that it is the engineers that are the magic.

This is a lesson that our industry has known for several decades.  

The core of the FDE model is that you send empowered engineers (and other product creators) directly to spend intense time embedded with customers, with the express purpose of learning the problem and solution space, so they can discover a solution that will achieve the necessary outcome.

I’ve been advocating this for as long as I’ve been writing articles and books, as has Steve Blank, and the legendary Bill Campbell was famous for making this case as well.

The challenge with this model in Palantir’s case is that if all they had were FDE’s, then they would quickly end up with thousands of large, bespoke solutions that would need to be maintained and improved indefinitely.

What makes Palantir so effective and so valuable is that they approached this problem as a platform product company. 

Each FDE is building prototypes using the latest of their platform services, and the platform product organization is constantly working to generalize and incorporate the new capabilities being identified by the FDE’s into the continuously evolving and improving platform.

Platform product is about understanding how to synthesize what is being learned across many FDEs, or what FDEs heard across many clients, or both, and then identifying the buildable abstractions, and creating the product capabilities that will make similar work significantly faster for the next client.

To be clear, this is much easier to say than it is to do.  

But with the necessary talent (especially strong platform engineering and platform product management), product vision and strategy, and organizational discipline, it can power an exceptionally valuable and differentiated business.

But here’s the key: you don’t need Palantir’s platform product strategy for the FDE to be an accelerator to creating effective products.

The original form of an FDE is to send them to not just one, but to multiple customers, so they can personally and directly see the similarities and the differences, with the goal of creating a single product that can serve the needs of multiple customers.  This is the essence of customer discovery.

For some products, especially consumer products, it’s not that hard to learn the nuances and intricacies of the customer environment, but for most products, this is critical and takes real time and effort.

Product discovery for AI agents is a current example of where this is important, and that’s why so many of these startups are embracing the FDE model.

When you combine the techniques of embedding engineers with your customers, with the power of prototypes for product discovery, you can start to see how product creators can create new products and services that provide real value and deliver real outcomes more effectively than ever before.

If you do nothing else, please consider having your best engineers visit the offices of your customers and meet directly with the users.

And if you’re an aspiring product creator, there is likely no faster path to get you to create something truly valuable than to embed with your target customer as you work to identify critical problems and discover an effective solution.

It’s worth noting that product creators that have successfully worked in this model have disproportionately gone on to exceptional careers in product creation, product leadership, and founding startups.

Special thanks to Adam Judelson for his feedback on a draft of this article.