Forward Deployed Engineering

Part of Lenny Rachitsky’s “The AI-Native Product Manager” free workshop series on Maven. Most products fail not because of bad engineering, but because teams build the wrong thing. They either overbuild features nobody asked for or underbuild solutions that miss the real problem. Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the antidote. What is FDE? Forward Deployed Engineering is a methodology where technical teams embed directly with customers to witness how software meets reality. Instead of building from assumptions, FDEs develop customer instinct by being in the field — watching real users interact with real products under real conditions. ...

Originally published on Next Play If you work in tech, you should learn about Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE). It’s quickly become one of the most popular roles that nearly all fast-growing AI companies are looking for…at the same time, it’s the type of role very few people and companies seem to actually understand. I designed Project Frontline at Palantir, a program that sent over 250 engineers into live customer deployments. Those engineers are now at OpenAI, xAI, Anduril, and dozens of leading companies. ...