Comment by jmspring
13 hours ago
Actually, I think there are areas of interest that come up in large companies. Microsoft started the equivalent of an FDE organization about 12 years ago. It was interesting to have the freedom to build and grow an organization from about 20 to 800 people. Working with customers and product teams to help get direct customer feedback to help evolve products was interesting. Now, 12 years later, FDEs are sort of the current buzzy role.
FDE allows execs to covertly circumvent their internal bureaucracy to ship faster. It will be interesting to see what execs make of that data.
I think it's a role that makes sense. Solution architects and pre-sales engineers are a role that has been sorta defined in the past. Working directly with customers gives much more market insight than PMs that don't actually ever talk to a customer.