By Dave Whittemore · Updated · 1 company case study
A forward deployed engineer (FDE) is a software engineer who works inside a customer's operations, with its real users, data and workflows. FDEs stay until the product does the job, and what they build on site goes back into the core product, so later customers need less custom work. Palantir made the role well known.
An engineer on site sees the real problem and can fix it in days, without long chains of handoffs. When the fix goes into the core software, the next customer starts with it already in place, so each deployment needs less custom work. Palantir's engineers adjusted the product on site and demonstrated it to the intelligence analysts who would use it, skipping the IT department. In 2016, soldiers in the 82nd Airborne did work in hours with Palantir that took days with the Raytheon-integrated system.
Embedded engineering teams are expensive. The model fails when each deployment stays a separate custom build, which turns the company into a consulting firm.
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
Forward-deployed engineers win the analysts directly
| What it is | How to tell it apart | Example | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forward-Deployed Engineering | Engineers working inside customer operations, with fixes returned to the shared product | Look for on-site engineering work that later customers reuse | Palantir engineers adjusting the product with analysts on site |
| Implementation Services | Migration, configuration and training that get a purchased system into use | Gets one customer live; nothing needs to return to the product | An EHR rollout migrating records and training staff |
| Professional Services | A sold line of human delivery that also feeds the product business | A separate revenue line; the people need not be engineers | CrowdStrike's incident-response practice before its first product |
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Palantir + | Forward Deployed Engineering — company terminology |