Palantir has a playbook for getting teams to use the software they pay for: Forward Deployed Engineering.
This year OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft put billions behind it.
At Teikametrics, we used it to take manual list building to zero. Run it on your team in 7 steps:
1/ Sit where the work happens.
→ Get into the team's Slack, the weekly pipeline meeting, the CRM, the sequencer and every enrichment tool.
→ Watch a rep build a list. Write down every copy-paste, every CSV export and every tab opened just to check a record.
→ At Teikametrics, the BDRs were carrying the work between Apollo, HubSpot and SmartScout by hand.
2/ Time the workflow your reps repeat most.
→ Time 3 real runs with a stopwatch and use the average.
→ Log every step: the tool, whether a person touches it, and the minutes.
→ Skip the stopwatch and you're guessing which step costs the most.
3/ Get your glue number.
→ Reps x lists per rep per week x minutes per list, divided by 60, is the hours your team spends moving data by hand.
→ Example with round numbers: 20 reps building 5 lists a week each, with 8 manual handoffs and 40 minutes per list, is 66.7 hours a week. That's 1.67 full-time people, almost 2 salaries a year.
4/ Fix the biggest group first.
→ Rank the manual steps by minutes per run x runs per week, then group the steps that 1 build can replace.
→ In that example, 1 Clay table covers 6 of the 8 handoffs. A list drops from 40 manual minutes to 8, the team's glue from 66.7 hours a we…
Founding FDE | O’Reilly Author, The FDE | Ex-Google, Bloomberg SWE · 9d ago
A post with 242 reactions this week says AI is deleting the junior engineer path. I spent a day trying to argue with it and I couldn't. AWS CEO Matt Garman called firing juniors because AI can do their jobs "the dumbest thing I've ever heard." His reason: "How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything." He's right.
Juniors learn on the boring work. CRUD endpoints. Glue code. "Add a field to the form." Five years of that and you've got a senior.
AI eats the boring work. So the pipeline breaks. That part is true and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
What I can tell you is where some of the work went, because I've been standing in it.
It went into the room with the customer. Figuring out what they actually need (they'll say three things, the real one is a fourth). Deploying into their VPC, their security review, the one guy who owns SSO. Owning it when it breaks on a Friday.
My title for that is Forward Deployed Engineer. Before anyone chases it, the honest version:
- Roughly 70% of my week is context, not code. Stakeholder calls. Docs I didn't write.
- You own outcomes you don't fully control.
- You WILL have to tell a room of directors and CTOs no at some point, sometimes regularly.
- If you want clear priorities and tickets, this role will wear you down fast.
If you got into this to write software, that's a real cost. Some weeks I feel it.
The path isn't deleted. It just doesn't start where it used to.
♻️ Follow if yo…
Bhavik Shah
Leading Enterprise Architecture for AI-Driven Platforms & Data Strategy at Scale · 3w ago
Forward deployed engineering is one of the hottest titles in hiring right now. I wrote about a part of that job that rarely gets talked about.
The story: a use case built in two weeks on a personal laptop, three demos, approved on day 13. Then the real work started.
→ Asset registration in the enterprise catalog
→ Migrating off a laptop onto approved infrastructure
→ Rebuilding logging, observability, and resiliency from the ground up
→ Reworking every data access pattern for enterprise rules
→ Clearing 20+ gateway controls before go-live
None of that was infrastructure sitting next to the prototype. Almost every step meant rewriting the prototype itself.
I also dig into where this actually overlaps with the forward deployed engineer role everyone's hiring for right now, and where it doesn't.
Full post: https://lnkd.in/ednamHnF
If you've made this same trip from prototype to production inside your own company, what part of the gap surprised you most?
#ForwardDeployedEngineer #SoftwareEngineering #EnterpriseArchitecture #MLOps #TechCareers #ProductionEngineering #AI
