This as told essay is based on a conversation with Vinoo Ganesh, the 34-year-old CEO of Kepler. He spent more than six years at Palantir in the 2010s and later worked at Citadel. He is based in New York. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Palantir had a program we called Project Frontline. The idea behind Frontline was: how can we bring software engineers into life as one forward engineer?
I actually went through a version of this before the program. I started on the product development team, did a long rotation as a forward-deployed engineer, and then returned to the product development team.
I ran the program for a while. We’ve had a number of people go through it. Some people stayed as forward-deployed engineers; some returned to software engineers.
At that time, the state of the world was such that progressive engineers worked very quickly and were very close to the customer. The software engineering team was mostly geographically active – some people were literally there PaloAlt – culturally isolated from the urgency that the FDE team had.
The idea was: walk a mile in the other person’s shoes.
Palantir has worked very hard to make all these people successful. We would give them mentors. They would have two points of contact: a forward deployed engineering manager and a software engineering manager.
People loved it. They would stay in company housing for a few months, somewhere other than their home office. It is not the case that every FDE has gone through this program; it was a group of software engineers who showed interest.
At Citadel we called it ‘business administration’. The target was much more aimed at internal portfolio managers and analysts. Palantir’s FDEs are much more focused on customers outside the company. At Citadel we were focused on people within the organization.
It was still the same business model: Citadel’s technical team has a core product and our goal is to better inform its development by working with portfolio managers, analysts and employees.
What other companies are doing wrong about FDEs
I have always modeled forward-thinking engineers as an extension of the product team. Your job is to solve problems to gain product insights that support product development.
Some people model it – incorrectly, in my opinion – as sales engineers. Some people model it as salespeople with quotas. I’ve seen everything from a forward-thinking equity researcher to a forward-thinking chief architect.
I think “FDE” is wrongly used as a stopgap for lack product-market fit at some of these companies. Where I see it being used is to force customers to use your product who might not otherwise want to.
Palantir had a culture of autonomy and empowerment. Once you’ve identified a problem, you can take action and start solving that problem. That allowed FDEs to thrive.
I think too Palantir’s product is almost perfect for the progressive engineering ecosystem. You’ve built this horizontal platform that can work across industries, and FDEs are the individuals who create the vertical applications.
I would think about our product and whether or not it is relevant to an FDE role. I don’t consider an FDE as a way to sell more tokens. I don’t view an FDE as a way to get users to use your product if a pain point hasn’t been solved yet.
It is now used as a collectible for any combination of sales, customer success, or marketing functions to show you care about customers.
I see that many organizations focus on bringing their product to the attention of as many people as possible, regardless of whether that actually yields a return on the composite product.
The world is not black and white. There are a lot of middle ground for what kind of FDE you need at what point in your journey. These are my opinions and not a formal statement about how Palantir did things.
I think this is the future of software engineering. When writing code is no longer the differentiator, the opportunity is: how do you deeply and profoundly understand customers?
It is very important to make software engineers worldwide more customer aware. For me, the FDE is more of a mentality than a job title.
Have you worked at Palantir? Contact reporter Henry Chandonnet on Signal at henrychand.30.
