CROSS-CATEGORY: The Forward Deployed Engineer Has Replaced the CSM as the Unit of Software Delivery — in Four Unrelated Categories at Once
SaaStr's customer success panel put numbers on it: the CSM role grew 700% through Q2 2022 and then flatlined for four years, while forward-deployed engineering is up 1,000%+ and still climbing. The same substitution shows up simultaneously in legal AI (Harvey deploys legal engineers with 8-10 years of practice alongside FDEs), speech infrastructure (AssemblyAI literally renamed its CSMs to Forward Deployed Engineers), data (Snowflake's primary hiring focus is now the GTM engineer, converting marketing ops and analysts into it), and foundation models (OpenAI sells Presence through its own FDEs and select GSIs). Four categories, four independent orgs, one role swap — when the product is non-deterministic, the post-sale motion becomes engineering.
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