Working with sales and CS
Contents
Forward deployed engineering (FDE) works alongside the sales, customer success (CS), and onboarding teams. They own the commercial relationship and bring us in when they need scoped delivery of technical outcomes.
Who owns what
- Sales owns the deal and the commercial relationship; see new business.
- CS / TAMs own the ongoing customer relationship and health; see customer success.
- FDE owns scoped technical engagements that unblock adoption or expansion.
We collaborate with these teams to provide focused, embedded technical work. The commercial relationship stays with the account owner throughout.
How FDE gets pulled in
Sales or CS flag a technical blocker or opportunity, and we scope it. Before you route something to us, run the quick self-check in how to get an FDE involved. That page also covers the cases where a customer can self-serve without an engagement at all, which is often.
One thing worth naming from the sales and CS side: an FDE ask usually surfaces mid-deal or mid-relationship, so the person routing it already holds the commercial context we don't. Bring that with you: where the account is in its lifecycle, what's actually at stake commercially, and how time-sensitive it is, so we scope against the real constraint rather than the technical problem in isolation. Then bring it to the
Pre-sale vs post-sale
FDE engagements begin where pre-sales ends. If a prospect needs deep, ongoing technical work to be convinced, that's a signal the engagement should be scoped.
- Pre-sale: helping a prospect prove PostHog will work for them through advisory reviews, proofs-of-concept, and architecture assessments, often alongside trials. Currently FDEs don't do pre-sales work.
- Post-sale: implementation, migration, and expansion work for existing customers. This is where the FDE engagements live, and where the work is most likely to compound.
Handoffs
Clean handoffs in both directions:
- Into FDE: CS or sales gives us the customer context and the technical ask, and we scope it before committing.
- Out of FDE: when the technical work is done, we hand the relationship back with a record of what was built, what the customer should do next, and any follow-on work captured explicitly. See handover for the checklist, and the sales team's sales handover for the adjacent process.
One rule of thumb: if the customer's team needs to act on something without us in the room, it belongs in a durable deliverable, not a Slack DM or a thread they'll never manage to find again.