Forward Deployed Engineering 101 — Kevin Bai, Anthropic, ex Palantir & Rippling Founding FDE
Summary
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is a go-to-market model where companies sell an 'outcome' rather than just a product or service. This involves loaning specialized engineers who build bespoke solutions on top of the company's core platform. FDE is necessary when selling highly technical platforms to non-technical, large enterprise buyers (e.g., Fortune 500 clients). To scale this model successfully, the underlying technology must be built upon a reusable platform with shared primitives, preventing the function from devolving into an unmaintainable 'dev shop.'
Key takeaways
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FDE Focuses on Outcomes, Not Products/Services
5:14
The goal is to sell the final business outcome (e.g., higher throughput of sales) rather than selling a piece of software or the time of an engineer. This model allows companies to land large contracts that self-serve motions cannot reach.
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FDE is Required for Specific Situations
6:58
An FDE function is only necessary when selling something very technical (like an app building platform) to a non-technical buyer. If the product is simple or the buyer is highly technical, other GTM strategies may suffice.
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Platform Reusability Prevents Failure
11:56
To scale FDE successfully, engineers must build on a platform of shared primitives. If every engineer builds entirely from scratch for each customer, the function becomes an unmaintainable 'dev shop,' leading to massive maintenance costs.
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AI Accelerates FDE Adoption
The current shift toward agentic and customizable platforms means that nearly all companies may face the situation of selling complex solutions to non-technical customers, making FDE a more common motion.
Technical details
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Platform Ontology
205s
A platform (like Foundry) enables organizations to centralize data and create an ontology, which means creating 'proper nouns' out of raw data sources (e.g., consolidating multiple tables into a single source of truth for warehouses).
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FDE vs. Dev Shop
716s
An FDE function is distinct from a 'dev shop' because the former builds on existing shared primitives, while the latter involves writing entirely bespoke software for every customer.
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Primitives Granularity
The required granularity of shared primitives depends on the use case; some industries require very robust primitives (e.g., AWS services like DynamoDB), while others need extremely granular tooling.
Mentioned resources
- Anthropic
- Rippling
- Palantir (Foundry)
Channel & topics
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