FDE practice development

Build your own FDE practice.

Big Robot helps you build a forward deployed engineering (FDE) practice through assessment, process design and coaching. Give your engineers the skills and support to work directly with customers, choose the right problems and improve results.

Strengthen discovery in your engineering team

We coach your team in observing work, questioning requests and testing ideas with users. Those skills help an FDE decide which changes are worth making and explain the decision.

We can also help you define the discovery and design skills to assess when hiring, then build coaching around the decisions your engineers need to make.

Connect customer learning to agentic delivery

We assess how customer findings reach the people and agents implementing changes. We help your team make that knowledge usable in development through clear product context, representative tests and evaluations.

Together, we identify where shared delivery tools would help and who should own their improvement.

Make improvement part of every engagement

We help your team establish baselines and targets with customers and plan measurement into the first release. That includes selecting or defining tools to capture and report progress.

Your team uses short cycles to review performance data with users and decide what to change next. We help you assign responsibility and reserve capacity for that follow-through.

Organize the practice around the work

We help you clarify which decisions FDEs can own, when they need specialist support and what customers must contribute. That includes reliable access to users, systems and data.

We can also assess how you allocate engineers across engagements, including competing customer commitments and the time needed for discovery, support and ongoing improvement.

For teams working on one complex product, the emphasis may include deeper product knowledge and getting customer findings back to the product team. Bespoke development teams may need more discovery and design support. We adapt the work to your customers and the capabilities you want to develop.

Start with the support your team needs

You can begin with an assessment of your current practice or coaching on a specific challenge. We agree on the capabilities to develop and the work that will help your team apply them.

Where useful, we can work alongside your team on an internal or customer pilot. We review the decisions and results together to see what the team can carry forward and where it needs more practice.

Discuss what your team needs to take on next

Tell us about the customer work you want your team to handle. We'll discuss where assessment or coaching could help and what would demonstrate progress.

Discuss your FDE practice

For help delivering a specific customer project, explore forward deployed engineering projects.