As VP of Product Management at HighLevel, Inc., I’ve seen firsthand how forward deployed engineers can transform product discovery, speed up learning, and deliver outcomes that matter. When engineers sit with customers, observe real workflows, and prototype in the moment, we turn assumptions into evidence and reduce the time from insight to impact.
“Note: This is part of the product creator series of articles, based on the overview article, The Era of the Product Creator. This series is intended for anyone that wants to create a successful product, whether or not the person has had professional training or experience in product management, product design, or engineering. In the…”
When I talk about Forward Deployed Engineers, I’m describing highly capable product engineers embedded directly with customers and the product discovery team. They partner closely with product management and design to run focused, time-boxed experiments, build rapid prototypes, and validate riskiest assumptions early. This approach is especially powerful in product discovery and gen ai initiatives where fast iteration and tight feedback loops are essential.
In practice, I’ve found that a forward deployed engineer becomes the bridge between what customers say and what the team can test today. For example, while exploring a gen ai workflow concept with a key customer, we co-created an interactive prototype in a single working session. That prototype turned abstract requirements into something concrete the customer could react to, which gave us high-quality signal and accelerated our decision-making without overcommitting to a full build.
My playbook is simple and disciplined: pair the forward deployed engineer with a product manager and designer, define the learning objective for each discovery sprint, and instrument prototypes to collect actionable data. We keep the scope small, the cycles short, and the bar high for code hygiene so that successful experiments can graduate into production safely. Most importantly, we measure learning velocity—how quickly we answer the critical questions that de-risk value, usability, feasibility, and viability.
There are guardrails. Forward deployed engineers are not on-call firefighters or ad hoc professional services. They are discovery accelerators. To avoid thrash, I time-box engagements, maintain a clear discovery backlog, and capture decisions and learnings so the broader team benefits. Rotating engineers through these assignments also builds stronger product instincts across engineering, which pays dividends well beyond a single initiative.
Ultimately, this is the product creator mindset in action: empowering cross-functional teams to discover what works before scaling what doesn’t. Forward deployed engineers help us validate real customer value quickly, particularly in fast-moving spaces like gen ai, and they elevate the entire product discovery practice.
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