Product Manager’s Guide to Transforming into FDE

In the past year, "FDE" (Forward Deployed Engineer) has changed from a job title within Palantir to one of the hottest recruitment keywords in the AI ​​industry. Large model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are recruiting. Domestic companies that make Agents and large industry models are also recruiting. At the same time, a large number of product managers began to seriously think about a question: Should I switch to FDE? This article wants to pour cold water on it first and then provide a way out. The cold water is: FDE is not a "product manager who can write code", nor is it an "upgraded version" of a product manager.