At first glance, forward engineerone of the best business technology terms at the moment, may sound like a new way to refer to what businesses have been calling it. implementation consultants decades.
After all, the main focus of distributed engineers is to embed directly into organizations to help implement and implement new technologies. That’s similar to the startup services that big consulting firms have provided for decades.
However, the reality is very different. While it is certainly true that FDEs are similar to traditional consultants in many ways, they are actually a different type of solution, and businesses looking for help with the use of technology should understand the differences in order to choose the best option for their needs.
To prove this point, let me go through what makes the most impactful FDEs, what makes them different from regular consultants and how organizations can decide what kind of help they need.
A brief introduction to distributed front-end developers
Let’s start with some basic context, for readers who may not be familiar with the trend of distributed front-end developers.
Also, a frontline engineer is someone who helps an organization implement technology. For example, I help manage FDE teams specialized in helping businesses design, deploy, configure and manage Salesforce solutions. FDEs can work for technology providers directly (like Salesforce), or they can be independent consultants who bring deep expertise to the technology vendor’s offerings but are not directly employed by the provider (my teams fall into the latter category).
AI vendors, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, have helped popularize the concept of FDEs in the past few years because they use FDE teams to help customers implement their products. However, both the term and the concept of FDE have a long history which started at Palantir in 2006.
What FDE teams do has a huge impact
To get a better understanding of what front-end developers do and how they help businesses, it’s helpful to break down their work process into key steps. They include:
- Adoption: Great FDE teams start by working closely with customers to find out what they really need – which is often different from what the customer initially thinks they need.
- Check data readiness: Because the success of almost any modern technology depends on having high-quality data to power it, smart FDEs make it a priority to assess customer data resources and hygiene early on.
- Assess the user’s needs and abilities: Impact FDE teams don’t just build a product that works for the closest contacts within the client’s organization. They take the time to understand what the end users of the solution actually want from it – lest they end up building something that the client signs off on, only to find out that it actually doesn’t fit.
- Match existing and new skills: While developers are sometimes tempted to rip and replace everything, a more efficient and effective approach is often for FDEs to build only what is needed to fill functional gaps within the customer’s workflow. They can then combine those new capabilities with existing ones, resulting in a solution that is flexible and enhances, rather than disrupts, the client’s operations.
- Use solutions: After taking full stock of the client’s needs and capabilities, FDEs sit down to create the required solution.
- Transfer information and ownership: FDE teams cannot stay at the customer’s location forever. Before they leave, it’s important to make sure the client understands how to use the solutions they’ve used.
It’s this end-to-end FDE workflow look, and it’s the ability to approach their mission holistically that sets the best FDE teams apart from those who are good at building solutions, but not so good at planning what they’re building with their customers’ needs and technology readiness.
FDEs versus traditional consultants: Key differences
However, this does not mean that the difference between front-end developers and general consultants also extends to their complete tasks. Traditional implementation consultants do that too.
However, there are other important differences between FDEs and “regular” advisors, and this is an important difference that businesses should weigh when deciding what type of startup partner they should seek.
One difference is speed: In traditional consulting, it often takes months, or sometimes even years, to bring a new solution to market. But in the fast-moving AI systems in which FDEs operate, that’s too far for businesses to wait. Good FDEs start creating value within weeks by launching production-ready products. Then, they continue to build until they fully meet the client’s needs.
FDEs also specialize in relying on new technologies. Traditional professionals may do this as well, but they have a tendency to choose tried and true solutions over state-of-the-art options. The former approach may be better for risk-averse businesses. For those focused on innovation, however, FDEs often provide a faster way.
FDE teams tend to be small, often consisting of no more than a dozen professionals, who stick with customers through the full scope of their implementation journey. This gives them the opportunity to know the customers and their needs very well.
In contrast, traditional professionals sometimes work with large teams, and rarely rotate employees in and out of different stages of the process. This isn’t inherently a problematic practice, but it results in less communication between the implementation partner and the customer, for better or worse.
Conclusion: A constant value of FDEs
Rather than replacing (or similar to) other implementation advisors, FDEs complement traditional advisors by filling in areas where the former often fail.
This is good news for businesses because it means they now have a wider set of solutions to choose from when looking for help getting started. Generic advisors are going nowhere. But the unique role that FDEs play in the implementation of modern technology (especially those focused on AI solutions) means that FDE teams, too, are poised to remain the core of business technology strategy for many years to come.
