Build Your Own FDE Playbook

Everyone knows Palantir’s Forward Deployed Engineer model. Everyone wants to copy it.

Most will fail.

I talked to the HappyRobot founder Pablo Palafox about this who had exactly this conversation with a Palantir co-founder. His advice:

“Don’t try to copy what we were doing. Just do your own thing.”

The Palantir playbook doesn’t translate to early-stage startups. You need your own version.

Here’s how HappyRobot is doing it:

First, the FDE role is actually impossible.

Nobody can code all day AND manage enterprise relationships AND handle organizational change management.

So HappyRobot split it into two roles:

1. Forward Deployed Engineers handle the technical building and implementation.

2. Deployment Strategists manage the commercial strategy and change management.

Two different humans, two different skill sets, working as one team.

The FDE at HappyRobot wears multiple hats: pre-sales solutioning, hands-on implementation, post-sales support, and product feedback loop. They’re not just coders or salespeople - they’re hybrids who jump from writing code to customer meetings to production debugging.

The Deployment Strategist, meanwhile, thinks commercially: How do we expand this account? What’s the change management strategy? Which requests should we push back on?

The FDE is good cop - embedded with the customer, building trust, saying “absolutely, we can do that.”

The Deployment Strategist is bad cop, asking: “Do you really need this? Will it move the needle? Is this worth delaying other features?”

This dual system solves the classic enterprise software dilemma: How do you stay customer-focused without becoming a custom dev shop?

Every feature request gets logged and tagged to the requesting customer. When multiple customers ask for the same thing, it gets built. When it’s just one customer’s edge case, the Deployment Strategist pushes back or finds a workaround.

This all sounds great on paper.

But finding good FDEs is brutally hard.

You need engineers who get excited about customer problems, not just technical puzzles. People who can code but also enjoy sitting with truckers and logistics operators.

Most engineers fail the human interaction test. Most who enjoy customer interaction can’t build anything real.

Founders, start by being the FDE yourself. Learn what the role requires in your context.

Then, when hiring, look for builders with unusual customer empathy - not traditional sales engineers. And make sure to create clear role definitions early (technical vs. commercial) even if one person does both initially.

Palantir built their model for government contracts, massive deployments, and long sales cycles.

Your startup needs something different. Design roles that fit your reality.

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Pablo Palafox, the Co-founder / CEO of HappyRobot ($60M+ raised from a16z, YC, Base10)

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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