Why the FDE role demands the best of both worlds, not an average

Forward Deployment Engineering is not about being a mediocre communicator who can also write some code. It demands being truly excellent on both sides of the aisle. On the business side, that means understanding workflows, cost, incentives, risk, adoption, business value, and the internal politics of a company — skills where strong consultants from McKinsey, BCG, or Bain naturally excel. On the technical side, it means fluency with models, systems, APIs, data, code, reliability, evals, guardrails, harnesses, post-training, and fine-tuning. Software engineers are naturally strong there but often need to drift toward the business side. The FDE who combines the best of both — not the worst, not the average — is the million-dollar hire. That person can translate business understanding into working software, end-to-end, without losing either thread.