Forward Deployed Engineers Are The Future Of PLG GTM
Product led growth works until it collides with real enterprise complexity.
Usage is climbing.
Big logos are inbound.
Then every serious deal turns into a messy implementation story.
You get security reviews.
Legacy tools nobody wants to own.
Three champions who care and six people who do not want anything to break.
At that point, more traditional sales headcount does not solve the problem.
You need people who can sit with the customer, live in the product, and wire real workflows into real stacks.
That is the role forward deployed engineers fill.
I think they are the future of PLG go to market.
In this piece I will walk through:
• What forward deployed engineers actually do
• When PLG companies need them
• How I saw this pattern play out at Deputy
• How to design the role and measure it
WHAT FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEERS REALLY DO
Forget the job title for a second.
Think about the motion.
A customer has a specific use case.
Your product is flexible, API heavy, and powerful.
The win is not a nicer demo.
The win is getting that use case live inside their stack without creating a huge maintenance headache.
Forward deployed engineers sit right in the middle of that.
They:
• Join calls with customer engineers and operators
• Unpack the use case in clear language
• Map that use case into your product and data model
• Build real workflows in the product with the customer watching
• Surface true blockers back to product and RevOps with revenue context
They are implementation experts with a number on their head.
They do not live in slide decks.
They live in the product and inside customer systems.
If you think about how products like Twilio spread, you can see the pattern.
Technical sellers and solutions teams sat with customers, touched code, and helped wire APIs into live systems.
That is the same motion, even if the badge does not say “FDE.”
WHEN PLG COMPANIES NEED FDEs
Very early PLG companies can survive on self serve plus a small success team.
The product is simpler.
The customers are smaller.
Most revenue comes from light usage and credit card tiers.
Things change once you hit real scale.
Research on PLG companies shows that the move toward heavier human help happens in the eight figure ARR range.
By roughly 20M to 50M ARR, more of your growth comes from larger customers with complex stacks and higher expectations for support and integration.
You start to blend pure PLG with sales assisted and sales led motions for those accounts.
This is the window where forward deployed engineers matter.
By the time you are in the 50M ARR neighborhood, the pattern is clear inside the business.
Enterprise deals stall on implementation risk.
Security and data teams have a long list of questions.
Your product can solve the problem, but nobody feels safe betting on a vague “we will handle it.”
You can throw more AEs at it.
Or you can put real builders in front of those accounts.
When I ran RevOps at Deputy we hit a version of this wall.
PLG was working.
We were in meaningful revenue territory.
Larger customers started to show up with strange stacks and serious operational risk if anything broke.
Our implementation team was strong.
They knew where the product bent and where it broke.
They saw patterns in which customers ramped usage fast and which ones flailed.
I pushed to move some of those people into mid market “sales.”
On paper they were now tied to revenue.
In practice they remained implementation experts.
Their job on a call looked like this:
• Understand the schedule, payroll, and compliance mess inside the account
• Open the product and design a real configuration path
• Call out gaps that would block success
• Flag those gaps back to product and leadership with clear dollar impact
There was no “showtime” mode.
They talked like operators, not closers.
They helped prospects see what life would look like after go live.
That motion paid off.
Deals moved faster when risk was handled by someone who could actually design the workflow.
Product got cleaner signals on which gaps mattered.
We were closer to revenue and closer to the work at the same time.
I did not have the phrase “forward deployed engineer” back then.
Looking back, that is what we were trying to build.
You can call the role FDE, Solutions Engineer, Agent PM, or something else.
The title matters less than the structure around it.
Here is a simple pattern that works for PLG companies in that 20M to 50M ARR band and beyond.
Source from your builders
Pull from your best SEs, implementation specialists, and product minded engineers.
Look for people who:
• Understand the product deeply
• Enjoy talking to customers
• Can explain tradeoffs without hiding risk
Give them a focused book of accounts
Do not bury them under hundreds of small users.
Give them a small set of high value customers and high potential prospects.
Make it clear that their time is for the most leveraged work.
Make the metrics match the job
If you comp them like pure AEs, they will act like pure AEs.
If you comp them only on project tasks, they will never think about revenue.
A blended set tends to work:
• Activation rate for assigned accounts
• Time to first value
• Expansion revenue over a rolling window
• Reference ready customers who are willing to take calls
You can keep some shared quota with an AE if you still run that model.
The key is that FDEs feel the revenue impact without being forced into hard closing behavior that does not fit the role.
Wire feedback loops into product and RevOps
Forward deployed engineers see the sharp edges of your product every day.
If that feedback stays in random Slack threads, you waste most of the value.
Set up a simple system:
• Every lost deal or stalled project gets a clear reason code
• Every recurring pattern becomes an input to roadmap
• Revenue impact is estimated and tracked
This is how the role shapes the product in favor of the segments that actually pay.
Once you have FDEs in place, your GTM model shifts.
Marketing still pulls the right users into the product.
Self serve still carries the lightweight journey.
For larger accounts, the path changes:
• Lead hits your system
• Product usage starts
• An FDE steps in when the account hits a defined threshold of size or intent
• That FDE maps the use case, lands a working design, and removes implementation risk
Sales stops being a performance.
It becomes a working session where the customer can see how the product fits their world.
The system benefits are clear:
• Higher win rates on complex deals
• Shorter cycles once serious buyers engage
• Cleaner signals for roadmap and pricing
• Better internal alignment across sales, product, and RevOps
I think forward deployed engineers, or whatever label companies choose, will sit at the center of PLG GTM for serious B2B products.
They are the people who translate messy reality into working systems.
They own the space between product and revenue.
They keep growth compounding when PLG alone is not enough to carry the weight of bigger deals.
