象限剖析：客户成熟度与 FDE 的战略匹配
在前沿技术落地企业（Enterprise Deployment）的过程中，厂商经常面临一个核心困惑：前沿部署工程（Forward Deployed Engineering: 深入客户现场、结合具体业务场景进行定制化开发和部署的工程交付职能）的定位究竟是什么？它与传统的专业服务或人员外包有何区别？为了厘清这一边界，Cursor 提出了一个基于客户数字化成熟度（Digital Maturity: 企业在基础设施、技术栈及研发流程上的数字化演进程度）与产品可定制化度（Product Customization: 产品对特定客户业务流程的适配与二次开发需求）的战略双维矩阵：
- 高成熟度 & 低定制化：此类客户拥有完备的工程团队，产品开箱即用。应当引导其通过自助服务（Self-Service: 客户无需人工干预自主完成订阅、配置和使用的交付模式）和标准文档完成交付，不应消耗宝贵的 FDE 资源。
- 低成熟度 & 低定制化：这属于典型的 SaaS 部署模式，项目往往呈现典型的瀑布流特征，同样不适合 FDE 介入。
- 高成熟度 & 高定制化：客户的技术实力强且业务场景复杂，产品展现出极高的使用率。此时 FDE 的角色应定位为技术顾问，协助客户进行深度集成与加速落地。
- 低成熟度 & 高定制化（矩阵核心区）：此类客户转型意愿强烈但缺乏匹配的技术阶队，需要 FDE 进行嵌入式转型（Embedded Transformation: 将技术专家深度植入客户组织内部以推进根本性技术与业务流程演进的交付模式），深度共建。
通过将核心战力集中在最能产生战略价值的“嵌入式转型”与“高定制化集成”象限，FDE 团队能有效避免陷入低价值的日常维护中。而在明确了这一战略匹配方向之后，如何筛选并构建匹配的技术人才梯队，则成为了这一模式能否顺利落地的关键。
Original English
>> Hello everyone. Can you hear me okay? Fantastic. Are we having a great conference? Everyone's excited? Amazing. I would love to introduce myself. My name is Pauline Brane. I lead the forward deployment engineering team globally at Cursor. I'm super excited to share some of the learnings that we've had as a company as we build out this function. I have been doing AI deployments to enterprises for the last 10 years across consulting and I've worked in it's my third tech company. So I'm incredibly excited to share some of the learnings. I encourage the discussions. I'm incredibly passionate about the FDE function and only 20 minutes to talk about it is not nearly enough. So please catch me after I'd love to chat with you about how we're thinking about this, what we've learned, and what we want to do going forward. So a couple things about Cursor. We are an AI coding platform as you are well aware. We have incredible products that we are offering as we're helping people go from autonomous coding to asynchronous and synchronous agents all the way to an AI software factory. I'm really going to focus today on the forward deployed engineering function and I want to share some of the learnings that we've had. So I'll really strictly focus on that but always eager to talk to you about what we're doing at Cursor and what we're building. So I always hear about FDE. I'm waiting for the Forbes article that's going to say 2026 hottest job of the year is the FDE. I feel like this is the year and I really want to talk about it. If you're thinking about building an FDE for your business, for your company, what I would personally recommend you do. And the first thing is I want you to understand your customers or at least the target market that you're going after and where they are in their transformation journey. And then I want you to understand your own product. What are you offering to those folks? How customizable is it? And the reason for that is cuz I think of it on on a matrix, right? And a lot of people ask me, \"Hey, is FDE like professional services? Is it the same thing as staff augmentation? What is FDE?\" And I have some pretty strong opinions about where it fits and where it's not a great use of your 10X engineers to invest that time in for your customers. So, the first part is think about your digital maturity of your customer. How how mature are they? How technically advanced are they? Where are they on their transformation? And how can you actually help them for it? The second part is the product customization. Like, how configurable is your product? Is it SAS straight out of the box? You just sort of send a login? Like, for example, Teams. Is it super easy to get set up and get running by yourself? Or is it highly customizable, highly configurable for your customers? And think about that on the metric. So, if you have a customer who is really mature in their digital transformation, they have engineers, um it's a low customization on your project, I would really just say provide your product in a self-service fashion, create give great documentation, probably not a great use of your FDE motion. Same thing on your low maturity, low customization. To me, this is like a traditional SaaS deployment, right? Like, I go in, deploy it. You can picture the waterfall project going through. Um not a great use of your FDE projects. Then you have customers who are really really mature and you have highly customizable products. Here, you're going to have crazy adoption, right? And I would say a lot of it should be your FDE team should be acting as advisers and help accelerate them. And then finally, you have some of your customers that are sort of further back in their transformation journey. They're learning a little bit about how to do it. They may not be able to hire or staff the folks that you you And so, they need a lot more help and here is where I think of like that embedded transformation. And then across this, that blue sort of square that you see is where I think the FTE really fits in. And for a few reasons, which is for those that are very mature, low customization, you can help them maybe extend, right? Create a couple new features, extend the application. You have that great feedback loop that you give to your product and engineering teams. But your FTE team won't be as helpful or as impactful with those folks. Same thing on high maturity, high customization, there's definitely room to help them, but they can do a lot of their work for them and you don't want to be like a solution architect, you don't want to be writing down bugs, you don't want to be, you know, updating documentation. You really want to focus on what's going to drive business for them. Same thing on the traditional deployment, maybe you can do some configuration extension. I would be very mindful that you're not doing a product 101 201 session, that you're not like holding workshops for everyone in the company to be trained on your latest SaaS software. I think that's not a good use of the FTE function personally.团队画像：高情商技术“独角兽”的职责重构
既然 FDE 在产品落地中扮演着如此关键的角色，那么怎样的人才才能胜任这一极具挑战性的岗位？Cursor 将合格的前沿部署工程师定义为兼具深厚技术实力与高情商（Emotional Quotient: 理解、管理自己并与他人顺畅沟通协作的非智力能力）的技术“独角兽”。
在日常工作中，FDE 的职责非常宽泛且充满动态挑战，这要求他们具备以下核心能力：
- 跨层级沟通与需求定义：能同时与企业决策层（如 CIO、CTO、COO）以及一线开发者进行深度对话，精准识别核心业务流程，并迅速将其转化为可实施的技术方案。
- 引领企业文化变革：FDE 不仅是技术专家，更是变革者（Actor of Change: 主动推进组织结构、流程和文化转型的人员）。仅在企业中引入先进工具而缺乏文化上的引导与配套调整，往往会导致新系统闲置。
- 敏锐的技术前瞻力：在 AI 技术日新月异的今天，FDE 必须保持强烈的好奇心，及时掌握最新的技术演进，满足客户视其为“行业顶级专家”的极高期望。
- 核心产品反馈闭环：由于深入客户业务，FDE 能够将第一手的产品反馈源源不断地回传给内部的研发和产品团队，主导未来路线图的演进。
在 Cursor 内部，FDE 团队的建设遵循极其严苛的高门槛原则。我们在早期只招收有 5 年以上经验、具备客户直面能力的资深软件工程师。为了实现规模化效应，团队在架构上采用灵活的矩阵式组织（Matrix Organization: 职能部门与项目团队交叉结合的扁平组织架构），目前按地理区域划分，并逐步向垂直行业领域演进，确保能够用最专业的行业黑话与金融或零售客户进行有效沟通。同时，团队内部会培育不同产品维度的领域专家，例如专属的长期运行云代理专家或 Cursor SDK 专家，供各个项目动态抽调。在构建了这样一支精锐之师后，如何将这股技术力量引入客户具体的代码库并产出真正的商业回报，则是考验 FDE 实战能力的试金石。
Original English
So then, once you've decided, \"Hey, where am I in this box?\" Hire accordingly, because you have to attract this talent, you have to pay them, and then you have to make sure that they are working on critical, interesting, important things. Otherwise, they're going to get bored, rightfully so, and they're going to leave because you sold them FTE that wasn't FTE in my opinion. So what is a magical unicorn that is the FTE, the forward deployed engineer? To us, it is someone incredibly technical who also has really high IQ. So what does the job entail? It entails working with all types of customers across all levels of the organizations, so CIOs, CTOs, COOs, as well as a developer, engineering managers, working with uh of transformations, VPs of AI. and so you have to be able to really quickly lead a discovery, find the right use case, understand their processes, how are they doing things today, how can you help them do things better. You have to understand their culture, how you're going to affect change, and then you have to accompany them on that digital transformation journey, right? So, you're an actor of change. Of course, you're using technology to do so, but you have to help them accompany them. I always say, if you put in the latest and greatest tech in your organization, and you don't accompany people, no one's going to use it. And then finally, as an FTE, you have to be at the cutting edge of the technological advancements. So, I don't know about you guys, but I'm you know, there's like new releases every week. We got to catch this up. You have to be curious. You have to be able to enjoy it and want to learn from it. Otherwise, this is not a fun job, let me tell you, because your customers are expecting you to be the expert, and that's super important. And then finally, you have to work very delicately between the product and engineering teams and your customers, where you want to give that feedback loop to your product team saying, \"Hey, we're hearing this over and over again.\" Uh and the FTE team is so close to the customers, embedded in their organizations, they're going to be the first ones have a really good pulse on what we should build next as a company. So, really effective feedback loop. Uh we work very closely with our engineering and product teams. So, I want to share a little bit about what Cursor looks like uh in terms of the FTE team, what we've learned, what works for us, what doesn't. Uh so, as you know, we are an AI coding platform. A lot of our customers are incredibly mature organizations, deeply technical buyers and users, and that has informed of who we hire and the profiles we're looking for. So, I recommend you think about who is buying your software, and how can you help them, and then match the right folks to hire in your FTE team. So, for us, it is project-based, highly impactful projects. So, I usually would like to work with the economic buyer or a very senior champion within my accounts to make sure that we are scoping something that is a strategic objective for the company, right? That is going to drive meaningful ROI for the company, and that they have the resourcing that they're going to put on this project. Because you're going to need to be working with them side by side. You're going to need to get access to their systems cuz we develop on top of their code base. You're going to need to affect change, so you're going to need to have, of course, the top-down support to do so. And you're going to make sure that you're working on something really meaningful that when you walk away at the end of the engagements, and we in our case have deployed cloud agents, long-running agents, we've deployed automations, we've built applications on top of our Cursor SDK, that when we walk away, it is a strict ROI for them. That means they're not going to turn things off when we leave, right? Because that's part of the FTE project. We want to make sure that we're affecting change and that we're building things that matter to them. Meaningful return on investment. We also some cool things is we push the edge cases for the Cursor platform. So, as we get really cool use cases that are a little bit outside of the software development life cycle, the FTE team to me is the tip of the spear that is going to test out these new use cases with customers. So, we have incredible folks working with us on, \"Hey, how do I help across my HR team? Uh my finance team? My supply chain team? My e-commerce team?\" Right? Working with retailers, financial banks. How do I do asset management better? And as we're pushing the the edge use cases for Cursor, we're getting more and more momentum on how we can help you do other things not just within the software development life cycle, which is super important, but also across your entire company. We work in co-development with customer teams in their code base. This is where you have to be really careful that you end up uh not doing staff augmentation. So, if anyone says, uh \"Yeah, you have to do this. Uh we're understaffed.\" Red flag for me personally. I get a little antsy on those phone calls. I'm like, \"Ooh, I don't think this is the right case for us.\" And so, you want to make sure that you're driving something meaningful that they're going to put resources towards and that you're going to work in collaboration. So, my trick is I just ask for who are the people we're going to work with. That's great. I'll be We'd love to partner with you on this use case. We love to build long-running agents to automate your call center ticketing system. Who will be the working team? So, super important to get that. And then finally, working between our engineering and our product teams to influence the road map um and our customers. So, let them know new things are coming that are going to all of a sudden enable use cases we couldn't do before. And that's the beauty of it is we can actually go and solve more things at scale very quickly. I would recommend you have a mission of the FTE. I'll offer you mine. This is the Cursor FTE mission. Uh we partner with your organization to co-design and co-build your AI software factory. We transform how you design, develop, and maintain software across your entire life cycle. I would just encourage that you have one. It's very clear to the customer what you're trying to drive. It's clear to your team of what we should focus on. And it helps our team members think, \"Hey, when I'm hearing this project that sounds like staff augmentation, I don't feel like I'm doing that towards our mission.\" So, that's ours. I offer you your own. What does the team structure at uh Cursor look like for the FTE is we are highly technical, highly experienced profiles. For the beginning, it makes sense for you to hire what I call unicorns. So, we hire 5 plus years software engineers. We don't hire out of school. We don't hire early career professionals at this moment. Once we grow the team bigger, we will. And so I welcome those folks that are reaching out to us. For the first set of founding for deployed engineers, we are hiring very technical folks with customer-facing experience. Over time, we will split the role, so we'll have folks that are a little bit less technical, more customer-facing, but still with technical aptitude and vice versa. Those are highly technical folks who perhaps are not as customer-ready, but have the aptitude to learn it. We have a matrix organization. We are ready to pivot in any way, shape, or form. That will happen. We are geography-based for now, but at some point we will likely mature to industries because when you talk to an industry and you don't use their lingo, you immediately lose credibility. So if you talk to a bank and you're not talking about payment systems, if you're not talking about asset management, risk, you kind of lost them. And so you really have to have that industry knowledge. And then finally, across our product areas, we really want to focus on having the right SMEs who then become the experts. So for example, we have someone on the team who is the expert on our long-running cloud agents. We have someone who's an expert on the cursor SDK. And other team members can come in on their projects and say, \"Hey, I need to pull in this person because they're important.\" So for us, we have folks phenomenal folks from Spotify, from Rippling, from Palantir, from a lot of organizations where we have found that we get the best people because they are incredibly excited to work with customers and they have the aptitude to do so. And then finally, we will change the roles and the structure over time. One thing we always joke about on my team is what we're doing today is not what we're going to do 6 months from now. We won't be hiring for the same profiles. We'll have changed. New products will have come out. Our customers will have changed in their journey.实战博弈：规避“人员外包”与生态共创
在 FDE 的实战部署中，最凶险的雷区莫过于演变为人员外包（Staff Augmentation: 客户因自身编制不足，直接将厂商的工程师当做补充人头，用于日常琐碎业务开发的合作模式）。这不仅会降低技术人才的成就感，还会使得项目偏离其核心的业务愿景。
为了彻底规避这一陷阱，FDE 团队必须在项目前期进行关键机制的设计与博弈：
- 锚定高层支持与共创机制：FDE 必须与客户方的经济买单人（Economic Buyer: 企业内部最终拥有采购预算决策权的资深管理者）或高级倡导者建立联系，确保项目处于公司级战略高度。
- 坚持“共创”而非“代工”：在接入客户系统的代码库前，必须明确要求对方投入同等对等的研发力量，通过协同设计和协同构建推进项目。
- 引入系统集成商进行生态扩圈：在做不擅长的变革管理或大规模的产品复制推广时，FDE 应充分借助系统集成商（System Integrators: 提供系统集成和交付定制服务的外部合作伙伴）的本地化服务与人脉优势，扩大产品触达深度。
- 敢于对不合理的诉求说“不”：如果客户的业务诉求与 Cursor 平台能力不符，直接坦诚告知。这不仅不会损害关系，反而能帮公司确立“值得信赖的伙伴”形象，并在未来锁定更为契合的潜在场景。
通过这套共创模式，Cursor FDE 不仅能让开发的云端代理或自动化应用真正扎根客户系统的深层逻辑，还能确保交付价值的可持续性，避免出现“人走茶凉”被下线的尴尬境地。当有了稳定的共创机制与明确的合作边界后，如何将这些宏大的目标细化为可执行的项目节点与清晰的 ROI 指标，则构成了项目管理的最后一环。
Original English
Here are some best practices. By the way, we We in no way perfect. I have done this for 10 years. I've made a ton of mistakes. Um learn quickly and pivot is my recommendation. Just learn from it. Try out a project with a customer. You might fail. That's okay. Right? Just actually try it out. You will learn so much more than if you're just kind of waiting and planning. I don't recommend doing that. Listen to your customers. I'll give you a really concrete example. Um I was not planning on offering this as an FTE offering. I've heard it six or seven times now and so I'm going to create one. The question I get asked is, \"Hey Pauline, how do I change my organization now that we have these amazing tools? How do I capture value? So, who do I hire? What are the job description? Um how do I rearrange the teams? Right? How do I change the ways of working together, the processes to actually go capture this value?\" Not something I was going to offer. Um so, we actually might be offering that very soon and we'll hire the right team to actually support that. So, listen to your customers and adopt accordingly. Uh work with partner organizations. You can always benefit from uh system integrators and consultings. One, they really know your customers. They've been in there for a while. They have great relationships. Two, there's a lot of stuff that I just frankly don't want to do and let's have the SIs do it. So, for example, I'm not really that great at change management. Not a fan favorite. Um and so, with a lot of that can be actually accompanied with partners. Same thing on rolling out uh existing products that we're really good at and we've done this a bunch across Telco. We've done it a bunch across healthcare life sciences. You can roll this out and increase the reach of your organizations. So, partner with your your uh system integrators and your consultants so they can go do that at scale and broaden in your reach. Talked about this already. Um don't be afraid to say no. This one's a hot topic. Uh I have customers who'll say, \"I want to do this.\" And I will say, \"Ooh, Cursor is not the right tool for that.\" Couple of reasons. One is you build credibility by being very honest about where our applications and our products and our platform are the right tools and where they're not. So, you earn a lot of um sort of feedback from that because they'll say, \"Actually, I have this other use case now that I trust you as a trusted partner.\" And then two, of course, if if it doesn't go well, then you're on the hook for that. So, I would recommend be very specific in the use cases you're solving. And then finally, attract and pay the right talent. So, just make sure that you are hiring the right profile for what you want to deliver on. Very dependent on you. We talked about this at the beginning. And make sure that you are attracting them, paying them, keeping them motivated. So, very important, especially in this you know, war for talent that we're currently in.项目管控：方向性范围与三维 ROI 衡量
一个成功的 FDE 项目，必须依赖严密的项目交付逻辑和可量化的商业回报。传统的项目管理模式往往容易在需求变更或范围失控中走向失败。
Cursor 认为，优秀的 FDE 运作机制应该体现为以下闭环：
- 定位核心痛点：避开表面的病征，顺藤摸瓜找到流程或部门的最终负责人，直接在根本环节解决业务堵点。
- 锁定方向性范围：拒绝类似于“租用两个 FDE 研发六个月”的粗放合作，采用以目标为导向的方向性范围（Directional Scope: 规定一个周期窗口例如6周，根据客户数据和系统的实际探查情况进行敏捷迭代与方向微调的项目范围管理模式）。这样既能保障交付的灵活性，又可以让客户在深入探寻数据和业务逻辑后敏捷转身。
- 三维 ROI 核心指标衡量：所有的 AI 代理（AI Agent: 能感知环境并进行自主决策、执行复杂任务的智能软件实体）或自动化部署，无论流程多么复杂，在商业层面的投资回报率（Return on Investment: 产出价值与投入成本的比例）必须归结于三点之一：增加营收、降低成本或降低风险。如果一个每天消耗 2000 美元的 AI 代理能够精准帮客户定位设备故障，从而避免更昂贵的线下停工和维修成本，那这就是一个极具说服力的 ROI 案例。
在项目结束后，FDE 团队需要将交付文档和沉淀下来的资产完整留给客户，帮助其彻底实现向 AI 软件工厂的进化。这种重实效、可度量的交付思路，不仅是 FDE 模式的最终目标，更是将 AI 技术从实验玩具推向企业生产环境的唯一坦途。
Original English
Here are the tips for running through FTE. Uh check you're solving the right problem. It seems easy. It's actually really not. Uh sometimes you're you're solving sort of a symptom, not the right problem. Sometimes you're talking to the wrong person who thinks they have the right problem, but they may not. So, just always inquire, ask questions, um who's responsible for this? Can I talk to them? Right? I really like to talk to the person responsible for the process, the workflow, the department, whatever we're trying to solve for. Define success from the start. If I accomplish this, will this be successful for you? If I automate this process from start to finish and then now takes 20 minutes instead of 3 hours, which is current baseline, is that sufficient for you? Does that measure success? Yes, great. Um I I have a lot of opinions about scope. So, I think that you cannot just do like, \"Hey, take two FTEs for 6 months, do whatever you want with them.\" I think that's a recipe for failure. What I would recommend is that you instead are trying to solve a problem and you establish what you're going to do to solve that problem. So, we want to automate this process from our start to finish using long-running agents. Long running agents are going to grab data from these. They're going to make these decisions. They're going to involve these people in the feedback loop, and they're going to go and reduce our mean time to resolution. They're going to go and automate this process from start to finish. They're going to reduce in terms of claims management the time to answer a customer on their claim. Whatever the KPIs that we're trying to drive, keep the scope directional. We're going to do phase one and two. We're going to automate these things. We're going to set up these agents for you. It's going to take 6 weeks. We're going to do as much or as little as we can. The reason for that is I do not know the customer processes. I haven't really seen their data. I haven't seen their systems, right? And so I'm a little bit on the hook if it takes more than 6 weeks or less. That's the first part. The second part is from a customer perspective, we're going to learn a lot, and they're going to maybe want to pivot once we learn something. And having something that's directional where I can go and sort of pivot based on the the learnings I have, customers actually really appreciate that in the end. And so that would be my recommendation. Involve the customer in every step step. Scoping, actually building and designing the solution, implementation, doing the human in the loop validation, looking at baseline versus the results, identifying the ROI we're driving. They should own that. We are supporting them in this journey, right? We are still hands-on keyboard. We are still configuring. We are still developing on top of their code base, but make sure you're not doing it alone. If you're doing it alone in their office in a little cubicle, we have a problem. Okay? Please raise your hand if that's the case. We need to solve something. Finally, measure success. Did were we successful? I said that we could do this from 3 hours to 20 minutes. Did we get close? If not, why not? What can we do about it? And then finally, what's the return on investment? You want to over communicate that. Right? I had a someone mentioning to me that an agent was running was costing $2,000 per day and I said, \"Well, what was the agent doing?\" And he explained it to me and I said, \"Hey, that sounds like you're actually reducing costs to send the right person to go fix this equipment. Would that not be worth $2,000 a day?\" And he said, \"Absolutely, but I never measured it this way.\" So, always think about what's the ROI you're driving. It's always three things, super simple. Am I increasing revenue? Am I decreasing costs? Or am I mitigating risks? That's it. Every company, as complex as they are, that's what they care about. Which one are you doing? Could be all three, which is fantastic, but at least one of them. Finally, leave your documentation artifacts behind so that you can help them. So, I'll 32-seconds wrap up. Build the right FTE motion for your company. Learn, pivot, and scale, super important. And then create this amazing culture where people want to be a part of it. They want to learn. They want to do their best work. And give them the chance to do so. And so, the the thing I'll leave you with is um you know, I always say hire A players, hire A players, B players hire C players. So, just be very mindful of that. Make sure that you are hiring the right talent for your organization, for your customers, and you're keeping them motivated. Thank you, everyone. >> [music]📌 文中提及的人物和组织
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