Choose a forward-deployed strategist mandate when the main need is understanding a customer workflow, shaping the deployment plan, and coordinating adoption. Choose a forward-deployed engineer mandate when the role must also build and operate the technical solution.
Titles differ across companies. Define the customer outcome, hands-on work, and decision authority in your own brief.
Map the customer engagement
| Responsibility | Clarify the owner |
|---|---|
| Workflow discovery | Understand how the customer works and where the problem sits |
| Scope | Decide what the deployment should address first |
| Technical implementation | Build integrations, configuration, or product extensions |
| Validation | Check that the solution works in the intended workflow |
| Adoption | Help the customer use the changed process |
| Product feedback | Translate recurring needs into product decisions |
A strategist may be technically fluent without being the primary engineer. An engineer may lead discovery as well as implementation. Neither distinction should be assumed from the title.
Identify the missing capability
If the team builds technically sound solutions that do not fit the customer’s work, investigate discovery and deployment strategy.
If the workflow is understood but integrations and implementation stall, investigate engineering capacity.
If both are missing, define a combined role carefully and provide support for the parts that require specialist depth.
Assess with a fictional deployment
Describe a fictional customer whose requested feature differs from the underlying workflow problem. Ask the candidate to plan discovery, narrow the scope, and explain what should happen next.
For an engineering mandate, add a technical integration constraint and ask for implementation and failure-handling reasoning.
For a strategy mandate, focus on stakeholder alignment, adoption dependencies, and how success would be established.
Clarify commercial boundaries
State whether the person supports presales, owns delivery, manages expansion, or hands off to another team. Customer trust can suffer when responsibilities change without explanation.
Also specify travel, onsite expectations, and who approves commitments about product capabilities. Do not imply unlimited customization when the product team has not agreed to it.
Write a concrete brief
Describe the first customer problem at a generalized level, the outputs expected, and the internal partners available. Protect confidential customer details during recruiting.
Use the forward-deployed engineer guide and FDE versus solutions engineer comparison. Discuss a customer-facing technical hire with Refery.