Field Note: Why FDEs Matter
Why forward-deployed engineers matter: real progress in the first week, not six. A day with an insurance adjuster and compliance officer.
Rule of thumb: if we can't show real progress to a customer within the first week, we've lost the plot.
9:12 a.m. I sat with an insurance adjuster who had sticky notes taped to their monitor. They needed a way to flag fraud cases faster. Our product didn't do it—so I hacked together a crude button that bundled their usual suspects. It wasn't pretty, but they could use it the same day.
2:47 p.m. Upstairs, the compliance officer only cared about audit trails. Our fancy dashboards were useless to him. We stripped them out and gave him a simple export he could send to regulators.
The impact was measurable: what used to take six weeks to prove value took nine days, and the size of the contract tripled within a quarter.
The reason forward-deployed engineers work is simple: sitting beside the customer shrinks the gap between "what we built" and "what they need."