As companies grow, the space between roles---and between customers and engineering---naturally widens. When the guy who sold the deal is also the one managing that customer's implementation and adoption, and they also happen to sit next to the Head of Product, solving customer issues is pretty straightforward.
But what happens when we scale?
Evolution.
Since I first applied to Gradial to be a Forward Deployed Product Manager, I've been wondering what that really meant.
After three months inhabiting that role, I have among other things, improvised demos, introduced new product features, supported sales efforts, cleared customer bugs, and even held-up my passport on my webcam to prove I exist.
I now think I have enough of an idea to share my thoughts on this new role in the ecosystem.
Now look, you can find plenty of job descriptions all saying something like "be the bridge between customers and engineering." Job descriptions are great at telling you, generally, what the role will be doing. They also fail to tell us what problem they're solving.
What I've come to realize is that the FDPM role is perhaps the truest manifestation yet of something I've written about before: The Translator.
Translation is an emergent property and the FDPM role is the natural evolution of that emergence.
The Forward Deployed Product Manager exists to reduce the distance between the customer and the product through understanding, translation, and trust.
A Forward Deployed Product Manager is the answer to how we keep customers happy, informed, aware, and engaged.
When a customer has an issue, the FDPM is there. In my experience, the majority of issues a customer runs into aren't actually product issues, they're issues of translation or approach. Someone misunderstood how something works and missed a step along the way. In these cases, the FDPM is there to not only reassure the customer, coach them up on how to succeed on the next run, and in doing so, protect the time of Engineering to focus on whatever Engineering needs to focus on.
When a customer has a success, the FDPM is the one who helped them get there and is ready to celebrate their win, while sharing the success stories of the most compelling wins with Product and Sales to help inform what they're building and selling next. Another opportunity for translation, as that customer success can inform product direction and sales stories ready to set up the next customer implementation when it helps close a new logo.
So the measure of an FDPM doesn't usually come in standard KPI, but in an upward trajectory of customer adeptness and a downward swing in misunderstandings, knowledge gaps, and frustrations.
As translators, great FDPMs understand the customer's context and how the product can best embed itself within it. They guide customers toward success in ways that extend beyond the product itself while continually reinforcing its value and preparing the ground for renewal.
The FDPM isn't simply a bridge between customers and product. They're an interpreter, advocate, teacher, strategist, and translator moving context in both directions so that customers, engineering, product, and sales all leave the conversation understanding a little more than when they entered it.
So what is an FDPM?
A Forward Deployed Product Manager exists to reduce the distance between customer reality and product trajectory through understanding, translation, and trust.
The FDPM role is to be incredibly focused on the success of their company and their customer. To ensure that Engineering has the space to not get bogged down in minor tweaks, but instead focus on the next opportunity to innovate. An ideal FDPM is technically competent, intellectually curious, actively solutions-focused, and able to understand that everyone at the table has a valuable POV that has to be balanced.
The more time I spend in this role, and the more I observe of others in it, the more I think that the value of the FDPM doesn't come from excellence in managing the product, it comes from increasingly shrinking the distance between customer realities and product trajectories while they both scale together.
