CLIENT-FACING ROLES

FDE vs product manager

Quick answer

A product manager decides what to build; an FDE builds it with a customer and feeds what was learnt back to the product.

	PRODUCT MANAGER	FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER
MAIN OUTPUT	Roadmap and requirements	A working deployment inside one customer's systems
CLIENT TIME	Similar than an FDE	High: discovery, demos and handover every week
WRITES PRODUCTION CODE	Rarely	Yes
PAY	See FDE salary in India for bands by experience and city.

The default language of data, integrations and LLM tooling.

Automated build, test and release pipelines.

Automated checks that prove your code still works after a change.