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The 2×2

Two axes decide the whole go-to-market: how technical the thing you sell is, and how technical the buyer is. Three quadrants have well-worn motions — DevRel, self-serve, sales-led. The fourth, a deeply technical platform sold to a non-technical buyer, is where forward deployed engineering lives.

Software engineers are some of the last people who should be customer-facing — ask any of them. So the idea at the heart of forward deployed engineering sounds ridiculous on arrival: take your engineers and send them to the forefront, into the customer's building, into the customer's problem. Palantir didn't do this because it was charming. It did this because of where it sat on a 2×2 that every software company sits on, whether it knows it or not.

WHO BUYS → NON-TECHNICALWHAT YOU SELL → TECHNICALDEVREL MOTIONGitHub · Datadogengineers absorb thecomplexity — it's their jobFDE MOTIONPalantir Foundrythe buyer can't carry it,so engineers deploy with itSELF-SERVE / PLGsimple dev toolsswipe a card, install,no hand-holding neededSALES-LED SAASJira · Slack · Ripplingcomplicated maybe — butconfigurable, not developed on
Two axes, four motions. Three quadrants have well-worn playbooks — FDE exists for the fourth.

The two axes

Axis one: what you sell. Is it a configurable tool, or a technical platform meant to be developed on? Axis two: who buys it. Is your buyer technical enough to absorb the complexity, or not?

Three of the four quadrants are solved problems:

  • Technical product, technical buyer — GitHub, Datadog. Incredibly complicated software, but the ICP is a CTO or CIO and the users are software engineers. They take the complexity and use it, because it's part of their job. Your motion is DevRel and developer engagement.
  • Configurable tool, non-technical buyer — Rippling, Jira, Slack. These tools might be complicated, but they're configurable, not developed upon. Selling them to a non-technical buyer is fine. Your motion is sales-led.
  • Simple tool, technical buyer — self-serve. Swipe a card. Nobody needs hand-holding.

The quadrant with no playbook

You only need FDE in the weird, unique situation Palantir found itself in: selling something very technical to a non-technical buyer.

Why was Palantir stuck there? Foundry — a platform for centralizing an organization's data into an ontology and building applications on top — is inherently uninteresting to the big tech companies. Google and Meta have great engineers who can build whatever apps the org needs. The customers who need Foundry are the Fortune 500 in oil and gas — companies whose pipelines carry fluorocarbons, not data. They have no engineering depth to develop on your platform, and no reason to build any.

In the wild

Place some familiar names on the grid: GitHub and Datadog sit in the DevRel quadrant. Jira, Slack, and Rippling sit in sales-led SaaS. Palantir's Foundry defined the FDE quadrant — and today's "agent for insurance / legal / logistics" platforms are moving into it in bulk, mostly without realizing they've changed quadrants.