PostHog Handbook Library / Forward Deployed Engineering

245 words. Estimated reading time: 2 min.

# Working with product engineering

Forward deployed engineers (FDEs) are one of the fastest feedback loops between real customer usage and the product roadmap.

### Feeding customer problems back

FDEs hit PostHog's rough edges under real customer workloads before anyone else does. When you find a bug or a product gap, tell the owning small team and file an issue: what broke, who hit it, what it blocked, and how to reproduce it. Good context gets it fixed faster, so the next customer never hits it.

### Escalations

When a customer engagement is blocked by something only a product team can fix, we hand off to the owning team. How that handoff works varies: some teams prefer async write-ups, others prefer you join their standup. Finding the best channel for each team is part of the job, the same way it is with customers. When something works well, share it with the team so others can use it.

### Contributing changes

FDEs can often fix or extend things directly rather than waiting on a team. When we do, we follow the same development process and review standards as everyone else, and we work with the owning team rather than around them.

### Respecting team ownership

Product teams own their areas, full stop. We find the owning small team, loop them in early, and respect their call on their surface. The whole point of feeding customer problems back is to make the roadmap better, and routing around the team that owns it defeats that.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/forward-deployed-engineering/working-with-product-engineering

GitHub source: contents/handbook/forward-deployed-engineering/working-with-product-engineering.md

Content hash: `5041cc8ee502e35e`