My First 100 Days as a Forward Deployed Engineer
What this role actually is, who it's for, and what it takes to succeed in it.
Why this role exists
With the AI race, enterprise SaaS pipeline grew faster than integration capacity could keep up with. Customer demand didn't let up either, and the cost of that bottleneck showed up in delayed deployments and stalled deals — prompting people to ask, “Where is the ROI in AI?”
Someone needed to sit between sales, engineering, and the customer to actually get implementations moving and unclog this bottleneck. That's why this role exists.
What an FDE does
Understand what a customer actually needs, pitch a solution, build it, test it, deploy it, and adjust once it's live. Then pass what we learn back to product and engineering, so real customer feedback reaches the people building the product.
Every customer is different. What stays constant is translating between technical and business conversations, playing roles in product, engineering, sales, and support departments.
Some of the best FDEs I know
- Want to understand why a business works the way it does, not just what they say they want
- Move between a technical conversation and a business one without much friction
- Are okay building something rough first, rather than waiting for it to be polished
- Don't mind setting things up from scratch so other teams have something to build on
- Want to shape what gets built next
How to succeed
Diagnose before you prescribe. Understand the actual problem first. The technical solution follows from that.
Feedback isn't optional. What you learn from customers needs to reach product and engineering.
Don't wait for polish. Early, rough versions are part of the process, not a failure of it.
Internal relationships matter as much as external ones. A lot of this job is making sure the right people are talking to each other.
Who am I
Before this, I worked directly with SMBs: cold calling, figuring out their problems, and building solutions to fit. There wasn't a playbook. I had to work out who to talk to and what actually mattered before I could build anything.
That's roughly what this role asks for: starting from greenfield discovery and building something people actually use. It's part of what attracted me to this role.