Palantir's forward deployed engineering started as a product strategy, not a sales motion, and @vinooganesh spends "How Forward Deployed Engineering is done at Kepler" arguing that the distinction is the whole ballgame for an early-stage company. Vinoo is CEO and Co-Founder of Kepler, and he built Project Frontline at Palantir, the rotation program that turned software engineers into FDEs. The talk is on @aiDotEngineer's YouTube. It's a field guide for anyone whose engineers sit with customers: how to turn what you see on site into product, instead of into a pile of one-off customer work. - The 14 terabytes of RAM story. A Palantir storage product built in isolation defaulted blank dates to the 1970 epoch, generated 2.3 million Cassandra key spaces, and would have needed 14 TB of RAM just to start. The gap wasn't research. It was not co-building with the customer. - Customers describe solutions, not problems. A VP handed over a 47-page requirements doc for a dashboard with 14 metrics, scoped at three months. Someone finally showed up on site and asked what the dispatcher does Monday morning. The answer was a Slack alert, built in four hours. - Whoever defines the problem owns the solution. That's why FDEs matter in early sales, not because they're good at talking to people. - Watch what users do, not what they say. An engineer fought a Parquet migration for a year. On site, they saw her double-clicking CSVs on Windows to eyeball data quality. They built a Parquet viewer that night; she approved the migration in two days and pipeline runs went from 17 hours to about two. - Signals worth chasing. Any task done more than once, copy-paste between tools, tab switching, an "ugh, I have to" reaction, or a user reaching for their phone mid-workflow. - Residents get the truth. Your badge and your contractor email address are your data mining permits. You can't survey your way to this. - Define the language and you're the foundation. Sales says customers, ops says clients, finance says billing entities, devs say org IDs. Nouns and verbs are what became the ontology. Users adopt your vocabulary along with your product. - Every hack goes into production. A Groovy retention script meant as a temporary fix was still running 12 months later at a nearly 100,000-person customer, and earned him a nickname that showed up on shirts at his wedding. Ship everything like it will run for 18 months. I'm working through the published talks from AI Engineer World's Fair sharing summaries and takeaways. Follow for more!