FDE only works if three jobs (customer-facing implementation, core engineering, and an architect tier between them) have clear owners; most current FDE roles collapse all three onto one team without giving them authority over any of them. In the AI-agent era the split doesn't disappear, it moves…
Good judgement is the intersection of prioritization, motivation, and technical skill. Most people only test technical skill, which is why teams erode a pillar at a time. The same framework helps you diagnose people more clearly: who you hire, who you coach, and what kind of manager you are…
The default SE posture of "being right" loses deals; solution-agnostic requirements gathering, a four-part discovery framework plus a solution bridge, is what actually helps customers and builds the artifact that protects the relationship downstream.
Sales engineering headcount doesn't have to scale linearly with the sales team. Treat the SE org as a product team building an internal "SE brain" (an LLM operating over a three-table documentation corpus of goals, market framing, and product capabilities), and AEs and CSMs become self-sufficient…
