Category: Customer Success
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The FDE Ships the Product. Someone Must Own the Outcome.
Define First to Deploy Fast The numbers are mind-boggling to me. Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineer roles increased more than 800% between January and September 2025, according to the Financial Times. Salesforce committed to building a team of 1,000 FDEs. The framing from a16z lands because it’s true: “Enterprises buying AI are like your…
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Nobody Defined Done
What Building GitLab’s Customer Usage Predictions Taught Me About Outcome-First Deployments I have a theory. I think most deployments fail not because of bad technology but because nobody defined “done” before the work started. It really is a litany of things (bad fit customer, loss of exec sponsor, competitor undercut, product issues, etc.), but I…
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Gainsight Pulse 2023 – Customer Health Scoring
I had the honor of sharing many of our learnings (bumps and bruises, especially!) on our Customer Health Scoring approach. Here is the recording (45 minutes including Q&A).
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PROVE Value to Your Customers
Visibility into customer accounts always seemed to the “holy grail” of Customer Success. While a fully-fledged Customer Health Score can require years of work and refinement, here are some ways to get started and finding value in 1-2 months (or less!). My company recently completed the first version of our Account Health Scoring methodology (more…
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You Are Building a Case Study
“You are building a case study here.” My boss told me this. It has stuck with me. It is an explicit reminder that we do not hire people to accomplish the same initiatives as their previous employers to replicate here — copy and paste does not apply. Our growth is a different target market. The team…
Jeff Beaumont 