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A reading guide for forward deployed engineers

The FDE TransitionMake AI work in the real world.

The work between a powerful demo and an outcome a customer can trust.

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15 published parts · Free to read

The shift

What changes when AI changes the product?

Forward deployed engineers are the fastest-growing seat in AI and the least defined. This series is written for the people in the seat and the leaders building around it: what the role is, what product, engineering, and sales owe it, what it owes them back, and how the work becomes roadmap. It is the FDE seat of The Product OS. A new part every Wednesday, written against that week's findings. Read in order; part 1 is the thesis.

Start here

The reading order.

Follow the series from the first idea to the latest field note.

Part 01

The FDE Is the Product Builder Wearing a Visitor Badge

OpenAI raised $4 billion for a deployment company. Anthropic launched a $1.5 billion one. The role they hire for is the Product Builder, from the services side.

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Part 02

2,000 of 17,000: The FDE Shortage Is a Product Problem

Only 2,000 of 17,000 US forward deployed engineers can deliver real ROI, and demand is up 2,100%. The gap is not talent. It is what the product lets an FDE do.

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Part 03

Absorb Pain, Excrete Product: The FDE Handback

Palantir made Fujitsu a Global FDE Partner. When someone else does the deploying, the handback has to be a written packet with a date, and a decision back.

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Continue the series

  1. 04Same Model, Twice the Bill: The FDE Codebase ContractA UC Berkeley study found the harness, not the model, sets what an answer costs. So what an FDE changes on site is a margin call. The contract, in three layers.
  2. 05In the Room, Not on the Quota: Who Owns the FDE PromiseA Forbes piece put FDEs on the sales team. Job data says zero percent carry a quota. Who owns the promise, and the one-page handshake that says so.
  3. 06Month Two: The FDE Leaves, the Workflow Has to StayGartner predicts 70% of enterprises will abandon FDE-built agentic AI by 2028. The FDE to customer success handoff is where that starts. Here is the page.
  4. 07The FDE Scorecard: Count What Stayed, Not Who Was SentAnthropic will train 10,000 FDEs and AWS will credential them. Neither tells you whether an engagement worked. Four numbers that do, and five to stop counting.
  5. 08The Career Out of the Seat: Draw the Exits, Not Just the LadderThe FDE career ladder is unsettled, and founders are now walking into the seat for paid work. Three exits to write into the offer, and one rule for the ladder.
  6. 09FDE Comp and the Equity Problem: Whose Stock Goes Up When the Loop ClosesIndian FDE postings grew 19-fold at about ₹12 lakh base while frontier labs pay up to 70 percent in equity. The seat is spreading where the upside isn't.
  7. 10Buying From an FDE Company: Write the Move-Out Into the ContractA CIO wrote 'stop sending me engineers.' An exit clause gets you out of an FDE contract. Six contract lines get you what you paid for.
  8. 11When Not to Hire Forward Deployed Engineers: The Honest CasesMilos Mandic estimates three in four FDE teams are dev shops. Five honest cases where the forward deployed seat is the wrong hire, and what to hire instead.
  9. 12The FDE Writes the Eval: Almost Right Has a NumberAneel Bhusri: 'almost right isn't good enough.' Colin Jarvis: FDEs built the evals. The eval is the deployment artifact, and the FDE writes it.
  10. 13A Model Alone Is Not an Agent: What the Tooling Changed for the FDE SeatAnthropic's S-1 defines forward-deployed engineers on page one and sells the harness they used to write. What that moves in the FDE seat, and what it doesn't.
  11. 14Palantir Can't Satiate Demand: What Breaks in the FDE Org at 100Palantir says it 'cannot satiate demand' and must re-resource. Five things break between the tenth FDE and the hundredth, and what the inventor did instead.
  12. 15NICE Moved Its FDEs Into Go-to-Market. The FDE Org Belongs Under the CPO.Three earnings calls named FDE teams this week with only sales and delivery numbers. The field's output is a product decision. Put the org under the CPO.

In The Product OS

The chapters this seat runs on.

The customer edge: deployments that land, and field findings back into the spec in hours, with fewer hops every quarter.

Part of The Product OS

One loop. Five seats.

This seat runs one part of the loop from customer to adoption, under the CPO. See how the other seats connect to it.

See the whole Product OS