Learning Fast Enough
From designing for "the average case" to sitting with nurses and dispatchers: how FDEs transform one-offs into product improvements that work everywhere.
Before we embedded engineers with customers, we tried to solve problems from behind our desks. We'd design for "the average case" and end up with software that didn't quite fit anyone.
After we started sending engineers into the field, the tone changed. Sitting next to a nurse in a busy hospital ward or a dispatcher in a logistics hub, they could see exactly what broke down in the moment. Sometimes that meant deleting features we were proud of. Sometimes it meant building a quick fix just for that site. The product team would then turn those one-offs into reusable upgrades for everyone.
The numbers are clear: time to first customer win dropped from months to weeks, and average deal size more than doubled once customers saw we could solve their biggest headaches.
The lesson is simple: forward-deployed engineers aren't about customization for its own sake—they're about learning fast enough to make the product valuable everywhere.