I spoke with Henry Chandonnet at Business Insider about Project Frontline and what companies are getting wrong about forward deployed engineering. The full as-told-to is there.
A short version of what I told them.
What Project Frontline Actually Was
It was a rotation, not a hiring funnel. We took software engineers and put them in front of customers with real support underneath them — dual mentorship, a way back out, and people whose job was to make sure the rotation worked. Around 250 engineers went through it. A lot of them run forward deployed teams now at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Anduril.
The structure mattered as much as the exposure. Dropping an engineer into a customer site without support doesn’t produce an FDE. It produces an engineer who never wants to see a customer again.
The First Mistake: Modeling FDEs as Sales Engineers
Most companies standing up an FDE function build it as a sales org — quota-carrying, pipeline-attached, compensated on closing. That’s a different job. An FDE is an extension of the product team. The output of the role is product insight, and you don’t get product insight from someone whose incentive is to make the current deal work.
The tell is what happens when the product doesn’t solve the customer’s problem. A sales-aligned FDE pushes the product anyway. A product-aligned FDE comes back and says what’s missing.
The Second Mistake: Using FDEs to Paper Over Missing PMF
The more expensive version. FDE becomes a catch-all — sales, customer success, implementation, sometimes marketing — layered on top of a product that hasn’t found its fit yet. The headcount makes the numbers work for a while, and the underlying problem stays invisible because there are people absorbing it by hand.
Forward deployment is not a substitute for product-market fit. It’s a way to find out precisely where the fit is and what it would take to widen it. If nobody wants what you’ve built, the answer isn’t more engineers in the field convincing them otherwise.
It’s a Mindset More Than a Title
The part that generalizes: the role is about understanding customers deeply enough to know which of their problems are worth solving. That’s a way of working, and it’s available to anyone who ships software to people — whether or not “forward deployed” appears in the job description.
The longer argument is in The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer and The Definitive Guide to Forward Deployed Engineering. Questions? Feel free to reach out.