Embed engineers directly with customers to hear feedback and ship solutions, often on the same day. This radical structure eliminates layers of communication (Product Managers, Customer Success) and scales the 'founder energy' of talking to users and immediately building what they need.
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Harvey's Forward Deployed Engineering team isn't just for building custom solutions. It's a strategic product discovery tool. By embedding engineers with large clients who have undefined GenAI needs, Harvey identifies and builds the next set of platform features, effectively using customer problems to pave its future roadmap.
While customer feedback is vital for identifying problems (e.g., 40% of 911 calls are non-urgent), customers rarely envision the best solution (e.g., an AI voice agent). A founder's role is to absorb the problem, then push for the technologically superior solution, even if it initially faces resistance.
The V0 team operates with minimal product management oversight, empowering product-minded engineers (often ex-founders) to make 95% of product decisions directly. This sacrifices potentially "perfect" choices for a dramatic increase in development velocity.
Sundial founder Julie Zhu intentionally avoids hiring product managers. This constraint forces engineers to take full ownership of the product definition and user value, preventing them from delegating critical product thinking and developing a stronger sense of customer empathy.
Most engineers only interact with customers during negative events like outages or escalations. To build customer empathy and a product mindset, leaders must intentionally create positive touchpoints. This includes sending engineers to customer conferences or including them on low-stakes customer calls.
To maximize speed, V0 operates with a "no handoffs" philosophy. Everyone, including designers and product managers, is expected to contribute code and submit their own pull requests. This "full-stack PM" model minimizes the coordination costs and wasted cycles of explaining changes.
Gamma compresses the product development cycle into a single day. They generate an idea in the morning, build a functional prototype, and use platforms like Voice Panel to run user research studies in the afternoon, yielding actionable feedback by evening. This operationalizes rapid, pre-build validation.
The rapid evolution of AI makes traditional product development cycles too slow. GitHub's CPO advises that every AI feature is a search for product-market fit. The best strategy is to find five customers with a shared problem and build openly with them, iterating daily rather than building in isolation for weeks.
