GUIDE
Your first 90 days as an FDE
What to focus on in your first three months as a Forward Deployed Engineer, from shadowing to owning a deployment.
Updated 2026-10-20By Forward Deployed Course editorial1 min read
The first three months set how customers and your team see you. Treat them in three phases.
Days 1–30: learn the product and shadow
- Get the product running yourself, end to end, as a customer would.
- Read past handover notes and post-mortems; they show where deployments break.
- Shadow a senior FDE on customer calls and write up what you notice.
- Ship one small fix, however minor, to learn the release process.
Days 31–60: own a slice
- Take ownership of one bounded piece of a live deployment, such as an integration or an eval set.
- Run part of a discovery session with a senior colleague in the room. Use the discovery checklist.
- Send the customer a weekly update yourself.
Days 61–90: own an outcome
- Lead a small engagement or a pilot phase from scope to demo.
- Agree the success measure with the customer up front and report against it.
- Write a handover note that a colleague can run without you. Use the handover checklist.
- Feed at least one product improvement back to the core team.
What good looks like at day 90
A customer who asks for you by name, a deployment that runs without you, and one change in the product that came from what you saw in the field.