Category: GTM Operations
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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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I Got Eight Weeks of Analysis Done in an Afternoon.
A Practitioner’s Guide to VSM and VSA in Knowledge Work Eleven months after launching a new expense approval system, I discovered that Stage 2 — the gap between Finance approval and Payables processing — was eating more than half of total cycle time. The bottleneck wasn’t the approval chain. It was the queue after approval.…
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Being a VP: Moving from Doing to Transforming
“We have too many VPs acting like directors — they are overpaid and ineffective for what they produce.” Someone said that to me early in my career. It landed hard. Not because it was harsh, but because I could picture exactly who they meant. The VP role is genuinely ambiguous. Most people who get promoted…
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Product Usage Data Strategy (A Nerd’s View)
“We have data gaps preventing us from knowing what our customers are doing. We have some manual workarounds, but we are flying pretty blind.” I hear this all the time. I’ve dealt with it at every startup I’ve ever worked and almost every one I’ve consulted with. In this post, I want to share the…
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Friday Recap Emails. Alternative Title: Demonstrating Your Effectiveness to Your Boss
I’ve followed the practice of sending my boss a weekly recap email every Friday since 2016. I still do it because it is so valuable. Sending your boss a weekly snapshot does many things for you: There are many more benefits. Let’s jump into the email structure now. It sounds like a lot. The email…
Jeff Beaumont 