Take the tour. Then notice it isn't the mechanism.
Atlassian's October 7 post on its forward deployed engineers reports 46 engineers moving toward 100, more than 100 enterprise customers, and more than 80 agents in production. Paavany Jayanty, who leads the US team, says every PM or engineer should be an FDE at some point and that it should be mandatory. Her reason holds up: embedded with a customer, you don't get to build something people don't want.
The same post says the loop back into product is what makes the program a strategic bet and not a services line. A rotation doesn't build that loop. It builds empathy in one person about one customer.
I've run the product side of deployment feedback. The story from the field is good. It gets told in a meeting, somebody says we should look at that, and the roadmap sales already promised eats the quarter. A PM back from a tour tells the same kind of story with more authority, and they saw exactly one customer. One is a workaround. Three is a feature.
So the mandatory part should be the decision. One named PM per product area reads every handback packet and answers in writing within two weeks: generalize, keep as configuration, or kill. Then rotate that PM, have them write the go-live packet for the deployment themselves, and have them come home with the count of other customers who have the same problem.
Vinoo Ganesh, who ran Palantir's rotation of about 250 engineers, puts the limit of a single tour in one line: one deployment is an anecdote and the tenth is a pattern.
The full piece is Every PM an FDE? The Rotation Is Not the Loop.