# Forward Deployed Engineers - Silicon Valley Product Group

<https://www.svpg.com/forward-deployed-engineers/>

- Host: [svpg.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/svpg.com/)
- Saved: September 17, 2025 (2025-09-17T12:51:43Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/9477b01b6206/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/9477b01b6206.json

## What Jamie wrote

People have made products for a very long time. Depending on the material that you use, you require different disciplines to build a product. If you are making a plastic nozzle that handles high pressure you probably need materials science people, someone that knows how to deal with high pressure, and who knows what else.

When you make software you need similar disciplines. It has changed a lot over the years. The roles have blurred. We used to require database people in nearly all products, but then databases got easier and only really specific requirements still need that. Even testing used to be specialized and has become less. But we still have a couple of major branches that are seen as different disciplines: notably product manager types that understand markets, and software developer types that create magical incantations for the computers. 

But at the core, it is all just making products and solutions. Everyone doing their part of their domain to make that a reality. This concept of Forward Deployed Engineers going to that core. Reduce cognitive overhead by limiting the count of brains. Get the solutioning as close to the user problem as possible — everything else is a layer of abstraction. 

> The core of the FDE model is that you send empowered engineers (and other product creators) directly to spend intense time embedded with customers, with the express purpose of learning the problem and solution space, so they can discover a solution that will achieve the necessary outcome.

The magic is less about the domains and figuring out how you generalize any of this into repeatable solutions. Building a single widget is fine. Building a machine that builds a million widgets is a whole different thing. 

> The original form of an FDE is to send them to not just one, but to multiple customers, so they can personally and directly see the similarities and the differences, with the goal of creating a _single product_that can serve the needs of multiple customers. This is the essence of [customer discovery](https://www.svpg.com/charter-customer-programs/).

Not everyone can do everything. We need specialization, even with AI coming onto the scene. However it would be good at regular times for any team making a product, regardless of your materials and your domains, to just remind themselves that they all have one job — to make the product. 

Reminds me a saying — what is the goal of the goalie in soccer? To stop the other team from scoring? No. To win the game.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT327: Weekly Thing 327 / Prototypes, Tahoe, UTF-8](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/327/), Notable

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.svpg.com/forward-deployed-engineers/