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.

Instead of a traditional product roadmap, give engineers ownership of a broad "problem space." This high-agency model pushes them to get "forward deployed" with customers, uncover real needs, and build solutions directly. This ensures product development is tied to actual pain points and fosters a strong sense of ownership.

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.

This specialized role bridges core research and customer needs. They don't just provide support; they solve complex, domain-specific problems by fine-tuning models, creating synthetic data, and building custom solutions, creating a tight feedback loop for the core science team.

The conventional software feedback loop is 'can I sell it?' Palantir's forward deployed engineers use a stronger loop: 'did it deliver the outcome?' This requires embedding obsessive, technical problem-solvers on the factory floor or in the foxhole to continuously solve backward and generalize learnings into the product.

Complex agentic products require hands-on help to deploy successfully. Gating Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) to only large customers leads to failed 'zombie deployments.' AI companies should view FDEs as an investment in customer success and word-of-mouth, even if it means initially spending a dollar to make a dollar.

Contrary to the traditional SaaS focus on high margins, Peregrine heavily invested in sending engineers on-site for weeks at a time. This "over-investment" in customer success built deep trust and retention, which was essential for growth in the high-trust government sector and ultimately improved long-term margins.

Serval hires 'future founder' types as Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). Their primary function isn't just implementation but to replicate the early-stage founder motion: directly interacting with customers, identifying pain points, and channeling that feedback immediately into product improvements, thus scaling the founder-led feedback loop.

To maximize their value, forward deployed engineers (FDEs) should not be a separate services team. Integrating them directly into the product organization ensures faster, higher-fidelity customer feedback and context capture, which directly shapes the core product.