FDE AcademyA free field guide for forward deployed engineersGitHub

Part I

Discover

Start with a person, a recurring task, and an observable problem. Watch how work happens today.

Example: a support team asks for a chatbot. First establish which customer tasks fail and why.

Chapter 1

Understand the role

Updated

Define the customer, the workflow, and your decision rights.

Read

  • What FDE means at OpenAI Start with a business outcome, then make the solution repeatable.Focus: Focus on customer-defined evaluations and replacing repeated custom implementations with reusable capability. Apply: Identify one repeated field constraint and propose a shared change with a second-deployment test.
  • Nick Wong, Special Projects Engineer A concrete account of finding an unowned problem and turning it into a product opportunity.
  • Reflections on Palantir A former FDE’s firsthand account of field work, data integration, and product development.Focus: Focus on integrating data, working alongside users, and the tension between local usefulness and generality. Apply: Describe one belief about the workflow that changed after observing it.
  • Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track BookTechnical leadership through work selection and organizational alignment.Focus: Start with the free “Work on what matters” guide; use the book for archetypes and organizational alignment. Apply: Write a decision memo: why this problem, why now, who must agree, and what you will stop doing.
  • How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory PodcastA former Palantir FDE on daily field work and how to set up FDEs elsewhere.Focus: Chapters at 19:11 (FDEs at Palantir), 38:02 (life as an FDE), 46:36 (advice on implementing FDEs), and 50:41 (the current state). Apply: List the habits Qureshi describes that you could adopt on your next customer engagement.
  • The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew PodcastA former Palantir and OpenAI leader on why AI startups are adopting the FDE model.Focus: How McGrew explains the gap between product capability and customer need, and where pricing and executive involvement come in. Apply: Write down which part of your current deployment is product discovery and which part is custom delivery.

Do

  • Write a one-page role charter: customer, sponsor, authority, and handoff owner.
  • Compare an FDE engagement with an SPE project using one concrete workflow.
  • Name a measurable user outcome and record its current baseline.

You are done when: A charter with one outcome, one owner, and an explicit out-of-scope list.