Forward deployed engineering at Parloa: Turning customer needs into platform capabilities

One of our customers needed their AI agents to hold context across a conversation in a way Parloa’s AMP platform didn't yet support. The feature was on our roadmap, but the customer needed it sooner.

So we designed it with them. As part of a design partnership with our customer, our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team worked with a Deployment Strategist (a specialized, in-field Product Manager) to build a production-ready solution for agent context management.

While the customer was able to use the capability before it was natively available in AMP, what we learned from building and running it in production is now informing Context Intelligence, our native approach to agent context management.

That loop of solving an immediate customer need while learning what the platform should support next is one of Forward Deployed Engineering’s primary roles at Parloa.

Every FDE team is shaped by where it came from

The “Forward Deployed Engineering” label is everywhere right now. AWS put a billion dollars behind a forward deployed organization. Salesforce built a partner network around the model. 

At a high level, the definition is straightforward: FDE teams are made up of customer-facing, high-impact engineers deployed where the work is. But the operating models beneath the label vary considerably, often reflecting where the team originated. Teams that grew out of Sales may end up doing solution engineering. Teams that grew out of Services might end up doing consulting. And teams that grew out of Engineering may end up doing product engineering.

At Parloa, FDE sits in the Commercial division and runs on Engineering's rules. Same tooling, same policies, same standards. This split is deliberate. We want the team close enough to customers to be able to address their needs quickly, while maintaining the engineering rigor required to build solutions that can eventually benefit the majority of the Parloa customer base.

The Parloa FDE focus

Today, our FDE team’s primary focus is on what we call Off-Platform Delivery.

A product roadmap has its own priorities and timelines, but customer needs don't always follow the same schedule. As the example at the beginning of the article describes, when the value of meeting that need justifies building ahead of the roadmap, FDE can build the capability off-platform, in production, with the customer. 

Deciding where to invest that effort is a joint responsibility between Product and Commercial leadership. We also work closely with Deployment Strategy, an embedded Product function, to ensure a Product Manager is involved from day one.

What the work looks like keeps changing, and that’s a good thing. A couple of years ago, FDE focused on complex integration services and rule engines to support multi-agent setups. Today, it's focused on multi-channel applications and closing platform gaps inside design partnerships. As AMP matures and more capabilities become native to the platform, FDE shifts its focus to new gaps and emerging customer needs.

What makes this work

The whole strategy hinges on one choice: a forward deployed team either feeds the platform or it becomes a consultancy with a product logo on it. Parloa built ours to feed the platform. That principle shapes how we operate:

We build with the broader platform in mind. Every engagement starts by asking what can we generalize beyond the immediate customer need, with Commercial and Product making that determination jointly.

We hold FDE to the same bar as any other engineering team at Parloa. That means on-call rotations, architecture design, and the same review processes. The blast radius of an FDE-developed feature may differ from a native platform feature, but the impact isn't any smaller for the customer relying on it. Their agents need to keep running, so we treat the engineering responsibility the same.

We treat bespoke work as technical debt. Every stop-gap we ship comes with a decision about what happens next, and our goal is for 80% of FDE builds to eventually graduate into the platform. It's a joint KPI between Commercial and Product.

We hire intentionally for these goals looking for engineers who are comfortable in front of a customer, who keep reusability and extensibility top-of-mind, and who'd rather expand the platform than ship the workaround.

Where this leads

AMP gets better every quarter. As more capabilities become native to the platform, FDE can focus on emerging customer needs and what AMP should support next. This team isn't here to make up for what the platform can't do. It's here to learn from customer needs in production and use those learnings to help shape what comes next.

The measure of a forward deployed team isn't how much it builds for one customer. It's how little of that stays bespoke.