WEBVTT

NOTE Sentence-level transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APqXGyCoGW4

NOTE One cue per sentence. Cue ids are the line anchors on /transcripts/APqXGyCoGW4.html. A cue ends where the next begins, or 2 s after its last word.

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[music]

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Hello everyone.

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Can you hear me okay?

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Fantastic.

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Are we having a great conference?

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Everyone's excited?

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Amazing.

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I would love to introduce myself.

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My name is Pauline Brane.

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I lead the forward deployment engineering team globally at Cursor.

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I'm super excited to share some of the learnings that we've had as a company as we build out this function.

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I have been doing AI deployments to enterprises for the last 10 years across consulting and I've worked in it's my third tech company.

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So I'm incredibly excited to share some of the learnings.

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I encourage the discussions.

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I'm incredibly passionate about the FDE function and only 20 minutes to talk about it is not nearly enough.

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So please catch me after I'd love to chat with you about how we're thinking about this, what we've learned, and what we want to do going forward.

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So a couple things about Cursor.

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We are an AI coding platform as you are well aware.

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We have incredible products that we are offering as we're helping people go from autonomous coding to asynchronous and synchronous agents all the way to an AI software factory.

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I'm really going to focus today on the forward deployed engineering function and I want to share some of the learnings that we've had.

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So I'll really strictly focus on that but always eager to talk to you about what we're doing at Cursor and what we're building.

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So I always hear about FDE.

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I'm waiting for the Forbes article that's going to say 2026 hottest job of the year is the FDE.

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I feel like this is the year and I really want to talk about it.

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If you're thinking about building an FDE for your business, for your company, what I would personally recommend you do.

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And the first thing is I want you to understand your customers or at least the target market that you're going after and where they are in their transformation journey.

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And then I want you to understand your own product.

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What are you offering to those folks?

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How customizable is it?

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And the reason for that is cuz I think of it on on a matrix, right?

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And a lot of people ask me, "Hey, is FDE like professional services?

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Is it the same thing as staff augmentation?

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What is FDE?"

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And I have some pretty strong opinions about where it fits and where it's not a great use of your 10X engineers to invest that time in for your customers.

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So, the first part is think about your digital maturity of your customer.

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How how mature are they?

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How technically advanced are they?

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Where are they on their transformation?

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And how can you actually help them for it?

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The second part is the product customization.

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Like, how configurable is your product?

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Is it SAS straight out of the box?

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You just sort of send a login?

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Like, for example, Teams.

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Is it super easy to get set up and get running by yourself?

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Or is it highly customizable, highly configurable for your customers?

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And think about that on the metric.

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So, if you have a customer who is really mature in their digital transformation, they have engineers, um it's a low customization on your project, I would really just say

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provide your product in a self-service fashion, create give great documentation, probably not a great use of your FDE motion.

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Same thing on your low maturity, low customization.

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To me, this is like a traditional SAS deployment, right?

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Like, I go in, deploy it.

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You can picture the waterfall project going through.

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Um not a great use of your FDE projects.

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Then you have customers who are really really mature and you have highly customizable products.

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Here, you're going to have crazy adoption, right?

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And I would say a lot of it should be your FDE team should be acting as advisers and help accelerate them.

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And then finally, you have some of your customers that are sort of further back in their transformation journey.

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They're learning a little bit about how to do it.

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They may not be able to hire or staff the folks that you you And so, they need a lot more help and here is where I think of like that embedded transformation.

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And then across this, that blue sort of square that you see is where I think the FTE really fits in.

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And for a few reasons, which is for those that are very mature, low customization, you can help them maybe extend, right?

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Create a couple new features, extend the application.

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You have that great feedback loop that you give to your product and engineering teams.

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But your FTE team won't be as helpful or as impactful with those folks.

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Same thing on high maturity, high customization, there's definitely room to help them, but they can do a lot of their work for them and you don't want to be like a solution architect, you don't want to be writing down bugs, you don't want to be, you know, updating documentation.

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You really want to focus on what's going to drive business for them.

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Same thing on the traditional deployment, maybe you can do some configuration extension.

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I would be very mindful that you're not doing a product 101 201 session, that you're not like holding workshops for everyone in the company to be trained on your latest SaaS software.

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I think that's not a good use of the FTE function personally.

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So then, once you've decided, "Hey, where am I in this box?"

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Hire accordingly, because you have to attract this talent, you have to pay them, and then you have to make sure that they are working on critical, interesting, important things.

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Otherwise, they're going to get bored, rightfully so, and they're going to leave because you sold them FTE that wasn't FTE in my opinion.

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So what is a magical unicorn that is the FTE, the forward deployed engineer?

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To us, it is someone incredibly technical who also has really high IQ.

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So what does the job entail?

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It entails working with all types of customers across all levels of the organizations, so CIOs, CTOs, COOs, as well as a developer, engineering managers, working with uh of transformations, VPs of AI.

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and so you have to be able to really quickly lead a discovery, find the right use case, understand their processes, how are they doing things today, how can you help them do things better.

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You have to understand their culture, how you're going to affect change, and then you have to accompany them on that digital transformation journey, right?

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So, you're an actor of change.

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Of course, you're using technology to do so, but you have to help them accompany them.

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I always say, if you put in the latest and greatest tech in your organization, and you don't accompany people, no one's going to use it.

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And then finally, as an FTE, you have to be at the cutting edge of the technological advancements.

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So, I don't know about you guys, but I'm you know, there's like new releases every week.

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We got to catch this up.

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You have to be curious.

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You have to be able to enjoy it and want to learn from it.

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Otherwise, this is not a fun job, let me tell you, because your customers are expecting you to be the expert, and that's super important.

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And then finally, you have to work very delicately between the product and engineering teams and your customers, where you want to give that feedback loop to your product team saying, "Hey, we're hearing this over and over again."

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Uh and the FTE team is so close to the customers, embedded in their organizations, they're going to be the first ones have a really good pulse on what we should build next as a company.

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So, really effective feedback loop.

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Uh we work very closely with our engineering and product teams.

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So, I want to share a little bit about what Cursor looks like uh in terms of the FTE team, what we've learned, what works for us, what doesn't.

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Uh so, as you know, we are an AI coding platform.

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A lot of our customers are incredibly

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[snorts]

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mature organizations, deeply technical buyers and users, and that has informed of who we hire and the profiles we're looking for.

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So, I recommend you think about who is buying your software, and how can you help them, and then match the right folks to hire in your FTE team.

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So, for us, it is project-based, highly impactful projects.

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So, I usually would like to work with the economic buyer or a very senior champion within my accounts to make sure that we are scoping something that is a strategic objective for the company,

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right?

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That is going to drive meaningful ROI for the company, and that they have the resourcing that they're going to put on this project.

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Because you're going to need to be working with them side by side.

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You're going to need to get access to their systems cuz we develop on top of their code base.

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You're going to need to affect change, so you're going to need to have, of course, the top-down support to do so.

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And you're going to make sure that you're working on something really meaningful that when you walk away at the end of the engagements, and we in our case have deployed

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cloud agents, long-running agents, we've deployed automations, we've built applications on top of our Cursor SDK, that when we walk away, it is a strict ROI for them.

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That means they're not going to turn things off when we leave, right?

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Because that's part of the FTE project.

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We want to make sure that we're affecting change and that we're building things that matter to them.

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Meaningful return on investment.

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We also some cool things is we push the edge cases for the Cursor platform.

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So, as we get really cool use cases that are a little bit outside of the software development life cycle, the FTE team to me is the tip of the spear

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that is going to test out these new use cases with customers.

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So, we have incredible folks working with us on, "Hey, how do I help across my HR team?

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Uh my finance team?

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My supply chain team?

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My e-commerce team?"

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Right?

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Working with retailers, financial banks.

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How do I do asset management better?

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And as we're pushing the the edge use cases for Cursor, we're getting more and more momentum on how we can help you do other things not just within the software development life cycle, which is super important,

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but also across your entire company.

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We work in co-development with customer teams in their code base.

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This is where you have to be really careful that you end up uh not doing staff augmentation.

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So, if anyone says, uh "Yeah, you have to do this.

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Uh we're understaffed."

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Red flag for me personally.

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I get a little antsy on those phone calls.

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I'm like, "Ooh, I don't think this is the right case for us."

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And so, you want to make sure that you're driving something meaningful that they're going to put resources towards and that you're going to work in collaboration.

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So, my trick is I just ask for who are the people we're going to work with.

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That's great.

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I'll be We'd love to partner with you on this use case.

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We love to build long-running agents to automate your call center ticketing system.

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Who will be the working team?

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So, super important to get that.

s138
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And then finally, working between our engineering and our product teams to influence the road map um and our customers.

s139
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So, let them know new things are coming that are going to all of a sudden enable use cases we couldn't do before.

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And that's the beauty of it is we can actually go and solve more things at scale very quickly.

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I would recommend you have a mission of the FTE.

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I'll offer you mine.

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This is the Cursor FTE mission.

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Uh we partner with your organization to co-design and co-build your AI software factory.

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We transform how you design, develop, and maintain software across your entire life cycle.

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I would just encourage that you have one.

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It's very clear to the customer what you're trying to drive.

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It's clear to your team of what we should focus on.

s149
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And it helps our team members think, "Hey, when I'm hearing this project that sounds like staff augmentation, I don't feel like I'm doing that towards our mission."

s150
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So, that's ours.

s151
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I offer you your own.

s152
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What does the team structure at uh Cursor look like for the FTE is we are highly technical, highly experienced profiles.

s153
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For the beginning, it makes sense for you to hire what I call unicorns.

s154
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So, we hire 5 plus years software engineers.

s155
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We don't hire out of school.

s156
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We don't hire early career professionals at this moment.

s157
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Once we grow the team bigger, we will.

s158
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And so I welcome those folks that are reaching out to us.

s159
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For the first set of founding for deployed engineers, we are hiring very technical folks with customer-facing experience.

s160
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Over time, we will split the role, so we'll have folks that are a little bit less technical, more customer-facing, but still with technical aptitude and vice versa.

s161
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Those are highly technical folks who perhaps are not as customer-ready, but have the aptitude to learn it.

s162
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We have a matrix organization.

s163
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We are ready to pivot in any way, shape, or form.

s164
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That will happen.

s165
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We are geography-based for now, but at some point we will likely mature to industries because when you talk to an industry and you don't use their lingo, you immediately lose credibility.

s166
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So if you talk to a bank and you're not talking about payment systems, if you're not talking about asset management, risk, you kind of lost them.

s167
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And so you really have to have that industry knowledge.

s168
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And then finally, across our product areas, we really want to focus on having the right SMEs who then become the experts.

s169
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So for example, we have someone on the team who is the expert on our long-running cloud agents.

s170
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We have someone who's an expert on the cursor SDK.

s171
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And other team members can come in on their projects and say, "Hey, I need to pull in this person because they're important."

s172
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So for us, we have folks phenomenal folks from Spotify, from Rippling, from Palantir, from a lot of organizations where we have found that we get the best people because they are incredibly excited to work with customers

s173
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and they have the aptitude to do so.

s174
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And then finally, we will change the roles and the structure over time.

s175
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One thing we always joke about on my team is what we're doing today is not what we're going to do 6 months from now.

s176
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We won't be hiring for the same profiles.

s177
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We'll have changed.

s178
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New products will have come out.

s179
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Our customers will have changed in their journey.

s180
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Here are some best practices.

s181
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By the way, we We in no way perfect.

s182
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I have done this for 10 years.

s183
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I've made a ton of mistakes.

s184
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Um learn quickly and pivot is my recommendation.

s185
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Just learn from it.

s186
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Try out a project with a customer.

s187
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You might fail.

s188
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That's okay.

s189
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Right?

s190
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Just actually try it out.

s191
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You will learn so much more than if you're just kind of waiting and planning.

s192
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I don't recommend doing that.

s193
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Listen to your customers.

s194
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I'll give you a really concrete example.

s195
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Um I was not planning on offering this as an FTE offering.

s196
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I've heard it six or seven times now and so I'm going to create one.

s197
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The question I get asked is, "Hey Pauline, how do I change my organization now that we have these amazing tools?

s198
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How do I capture value?

s199
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So, who do I hire?

s200
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What are the job description?

s201
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Um how do I rearrange the teams?

s202
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Right?

s203
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How do I change the ways of working together, the processes to actually go capture this value?"

s204
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Not something I was going to offer.

s205
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Um so, we actually might be offering that very soon and we'll hire the right team to actually support that.

s206
00:14:23.320 --> 00:14:26.800
So, listen to your customers and adopt accordingly.

s207
00:14:26.800 --> 00:14:28.320
Uh work with partner organizations.

s208
00:14:28.320 --> 00:14:32.839
You can always benefit from uh system integrators and consultings.

s209
00:14:32.839 --> 00:14:35.040
One, they really know your customers.

s210
00:14:35.040 --> 00:14:36.040
They've been in there for a while.

s211
00:14:36.040 --> 00:14:37.600
They have great relationships.

s212
00:14:37.600 --> 00:14:42.040
Two, there's a lot of stuff that I just frankly don't want to do and let's have the SIs do it.

s213
00:14:42.040 --> 00:14:45.120
So, for example, I'm not really that great at change management.

s214
00:14:45.120 --> 00:14:46.640
Not a fan favorite.

s215
00:14:46.640 --> 00:14:50.120
Um and so, with a lot of that can be actually accompanied with partners.

s216
00:14:50.120 --> 00:14:56.040
Same thing on rolling out uh existing products that we're really good at and we've done this a bunch across Telco.

s217
00:14:56.040 --> 00:14:58.720
We've done it a bunch across healthcare life sciences.

s218
00:14:58.720 --> 00:15:02.200
You can roll this out and increase the reach of your organizations.

s219
00:15:02.200 --> 00:15:10.000
So, partner with your your uh system integrators and your consultants so they can go do that at scale and broaden in your reach.

s220
00:15:10.000 --> 00:15:11.120
Talked about this already.

s221
00:15:11.120 --> 00:15:15.480
Um don't be afraid to say no. This one's a hot topic.

s222
00:15:15.480 --> 00:15:17.920
Uh I have customers who'll say, "I want to do this."

s223
00:15:17.920 --> 00:15:21.280
And I will say, "Ooh, Cursor is not the right tool for that."

s224
00:15:21.280 --> 00:15:22.200
Couple of reasons.

s225
00:15:22.200 --> 00:15:30.920
One is you build credibility by being very honest about where our applications and our products and our platform are the right tools and where they're not.

s226
00:15:30.920 --> 00:15:38.680
So, you earn a lot of um sort of feedback from that because they'll say, "Actually, I have this other use case now that I trust you as a trusted partner."

s227
00:15:38.680 --> 00:15:42.000
And then two, of course, if if it doesn't go well, then you're on the hook for that.

s228
00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:46.520
So, I would recommend be very specific in the use cases you're solving.

s229
00:15:46.520 --> 00:15:49.040
And then finally, attract and pay the right talent.

s230
00:15:49.040 --> 00:15:54.400
So, just make sure that you are hiring the right profile for what you want to deliver on.

s231
00:15:54.400 --> 00:15:55.280
Very dependent on you.

s232
00:15:55.280 --> 00:15:57.040
We talked about this at the beginning.

s233
00:15:57.040 --> 00:16:01.480
And make sure that you are attracting them, paying them, keeping them motivated.

s234
00:16:01.480 --> 00:16:07.200
So, very important, especially in this you know, war for talent that we're currently in.

s235
00:16:07.200 --> 00:16:09.600
Here are the tips for running through FTE.

s236
00:16:09.600 --> 00:16:11.640
Uh check you're solving the right problem.

s237
00:16:11.640 --> 00:16:12.760
It seems easy.

s238
00:16:12.760 --> 00:16:13.960
It's actually really not.

s239
00:16:13.960 --> 00:16:18.000
Uh sometimes you're you're solving sort of a symptom, not the right problem.

s240
00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:22.160
Sometimes you're talking to the wrong person who thinks they have the right problem, but they may not.

s241
00:16:22.160 --> 00:16:26.720
So, just always inquire, ask questions, um who's responsible for this?

s242
00:16:26.720 --> 00:16:28.200
Can I talk to them?

s243
00:16:28.200 --> 00:16:28.400
Right?

s244
00:16:28.400 --> 00:16:35.680
I really like to talk to the person responsible for the process, the workflow, the department, whatever we're trying to solve for.

s245
00:16:35.680 --> 00:16:37.680
Define success from the start.

s246
00:16:37.680 --> 00:16:41.800
If I accomplish this, will this be successful for you?

s247
00:16:41.800 --> 00:16:50.720
If I automate this process from start to finish and then now takes 20 minutes instead of 3 hours, which is current baseline, is that sufficient for you?

s248
00:16:50.720 --> 00:16:52.200
Does that measure success?

s249
00:16:52.200 --> 00:16:54.000
Yes, great.

s250
00:16:54.000 --> 00:16:58.080
Um I I have a lot of opinions about scope.

s251
00:16:58.080 --> 00:17:04.880
So, I think that you cannot just do like, "Hey, take two FTEs for 6 months, do whatever you want with them."

s252
00:17:04.880 --> 00:17:07.079
I think that's a recipe for failure.

s253
00:17:07.079 --> 00:17:13.480
What I would recommend is that you instead are trying to solve a problem and you establish what you're going to do to solve that problem.

s254
00:17:13.480 --> 00:17:17.839
So, we want to automate this process from our start to finish using long-running agents.

s255
00:17:17.839 --> 00:17:20.520
Long running agents are going to grab data from these.

s256
00:17:20.520 --> 00:17:21.920
They're going to make these decisions.

s257
00:17:21.920 --> 00:17:28.040
They're going to involve these people in the feedback loop, and they're going to go and reduce our mean time to resolution.

s258
00:17:28.040 --> 00:17:30.880
They're going to go and automate this process from start to finish.

s259
00:17:30.880 --> 00:17:37.400
They're going to reduce in terms of claims management the time to answer a customer on their claim.

s260
00:17:37.400 --> 00:17:41.560
Whatever the KPIs that we're trying to drive, keep the scope directional.

s261
00:17:41.560 --> 00:17:43.120
We're going to do phase one and two.

s262
00:17:43.120 --> 00:17:44.360
We're going to automate these things.

s263
00:17:44.360 --> 00:17:46.360
We're going to set up these agents for you.

s264
00:17:46.360 --> 00:17:48.000
It's going to take 6 weeks.

s265
00:17:48.000 --> 00:17:50.680
We're going to do as much or as little as we can.

s266
00:17:50.680 --> 00:17:55.040
The reason for that is I do not know the customer processes.

s267
00:17:55.040 --> 00:17:56.840
I haven't really seen their data.

s268
00:17:56.840 --> 00:17:58.680
I haven't seen their systems, right?

s269
00:17:58.680 --> 00:18:02.040
And so I'm a little bit on the hook if it takes more than 6 weeks or less.

s270
00:18:02.040 --> 00:18:03.360
That's the first part.

s271
00:18:03.360 --> 00:18:10.720
The second part is from a customer perspective, we're going to learn a lot, and they're going to maybe want to pivot once we learn something.

s272
00:18:10.720 --> 00:18:18.640
And having something that's directional where I can go and sort of pivot based on the the learnings I have, customers actually really appreciate that in the end.

s273
00:18:18.640 --> 00:18:21.440
And so that would be my recommendation.

s274
00:18:21.600 --> 00:18:24.160
Involve the customer in every step step.

s275
00:18:24.160 --> 00:18:36.800
Scoping, actually building and designing the solution, implementation, doing the human in the loop validation, looking at baseline versus the results, identifying the ROI we're driving.

s276
00:18:36.800 --> 00:18:38.040
They should own that.

s277
00:18:38.040 --> 00:18:41.000
We are supporting them in this journey, right?

s278
00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:42.360
We are still hands-on keyboard.

s279
00:18:42.360 --> 00:18:43.560
We are still configuring.

s280
00:18:43.560 --> 00:18:48.440
We are still developing on top of their code base, but make sure you're not doing it alone.

s281
00:18:48.440 --> 00:18:53.560
If you're doing it alone in their office in a little cubicle, we have a problem.

s282
00:18:53.560 --> 00:18:54.240
Okay?

s283
00:18:54.240 --> 00:18:56.280
Please raise your hand if that's the case.

s284
00:18:56.280 --> 00:18:58.440
We need to solve something.

s285
00:18:58.440 --> 00:18:59.800
Finally, measure success.

s286
00:18:59.800 --> 00:19:00.880
Did were we successful?

s287
00:19:00.880 --> 00:19:04.000
I said that we could do this from 3 hours to 20 minutes.

s288
00:19:04.000 --> 00:19:05.120
Did we get close?

s289
00:19:05.120 --> 00:19:06.760
If not, why not?

s290
00:19:06.760 --> 00:19:08.200
What can we do about it?

s291
00:19:08.200 --> 00:19:10.040
And then finally, what's the return on investment?

s292
00:19:10.040 --> 00:19:12.400
You want to over communicate that.

s293
00:19:12.400 --> 00:19:12.720
Right?

s294
00:19:12.720 --> 00:19:19.560
I had a someone mentioning to me that an agent was running was costing $2,000 per day and I said, "Well, what was the agent doing?"

s295
00:19:19.560 --> 00:19:26.040
And he explained it to me and I said, "Hey, that sounds like you're actually reducing costs to send the right person to go fix this equipment.

s296
00:19:26.040 --> 00:19:27.840
Would that not be worth $2,000 a day?"

s297
00:19:27.840 --> 00:19:31.000
And he said, "Absolutely, but I never measured it this way."

s298
00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:33.560
So, always think about what's the ROI you're driving.

s299
00:19:33.560 --> 00:19:35.760
It's always three things, super simple.

s300
00:19:35.760 --> 00:19:37.480
Am I increasing revenue?

s301
00:19:37.480 --> 00:19:39.120
Am I decreasing costs?

s302
00:19:39.120 --> 00:19:40.840
Or am I mitigating risks?

s303
00:19:40.840 --> 00:19:41.400
That's it.

s304
00:19:41.400 --> 00:19:45.000
Every company, as complex as they are, that's what they care about.

s305
00:19:45.000 --> 00:19:46.400
Which one are you doing?

s306
00:19:46.400 --> 00:19:51.480
Could be all three, which is fantastic, but at least one of them.

s307
00:19:51.600 --> 00:19:55.560
Finally, leave your documentation artifacts behind so that you can help them.

s308
00:19:55.560 --> 00:19:58.400
So, I'll 32-seconds wrap up.

s309
00:19:58.400 --> 00:20:01.600
Build the right FTE motion for your company.

s310
00:20:01.600 --> 00:20:04.760
Learn, pivot, and scale, super important.

s311
00:20:04.760 --> 00:20:08.560
And then create this amazing culture where people want to be a part of it.

s312
00:20:08.560 --> 00:20:09.760
They want to learn.

s313
00:20:09.760 --> 00:20:11.560
They want to do their best work.

s314
00:20:11.560 --> 00:20:13.840
And give them the chance to do so.

s315
00:20:13.840 --> 00:20:21.120
And so, the the thing I'll leave you with is um you know, I always say hire A players, hire A players, B players hire C players.

s316
00:20:21.120 --> 00:20:22.920
So, just be very mindful of that.

s317
00:20:22.920 --> 00:20:29.400
Make sure that you are hiring the right talent for your organization, for your customers, and you're keeping them motivated.

s318
00:20:29.400 --> 00:20:31.680
Thank you, everyone.

s319
00:20:45.169 --> 00:20:47.169
[music]