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FDE Scoping Messy Problems: Founding FDE and O'Reilly Author

Hosted by Paden Gayle

Fri, Oct 9, 2026

6:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

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Become a Forward Deployed Engineer: The Future-Proof Path for Software Engineers
Paden Gayle
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What you'll learn

Hear the problem under the request

What customers ask for versus what they need, and the questions that surface the gap before you build anything.

Cut scope without losing the customer

How to narrow the work, say what you're not doing, and keep the room bought in instead of feeling shortchanged.

Recognize when discovery is done

The signal that you have enough to start building, and why staying in discovery too long costs you credibility.

Why this topic matters

This part of the job has no equivalent in normal engineering. There's no ticket and no spec. A customer describes a symptom, and the thing they ask you to build is usually not the thing that fixes it. Get it wrong and you burn weeks and trust at the same time. This is the skill that separates FDEs who last from ones who don't. I do this job. Not a version of it from five years ago, and not a version I read about.

You'll learn from

Paden Gayle

Founding FDE @ Notion | O'Reilly Author | Ex-Google, Bloomberg

I'm a founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Notion, where I built the technical delivery model our team uses to run high-stakes enterprise migrations. I'm also writing The Forward Deployed Engineer's Handbook for O'Reilly, the first definitive guide to the role.

Before Notion I was a Software Engineer at Google and Bloomberg, building certificate authority infrastructure and large-scale data platforms. I've also coached 600+ engineers through career transitions into top companies.

I teach this because I'm doing the job right now, not summarizing it from articles. Everything in my workshops comes from live engagements: real scoping decisions, real security reviews, real stakeholder fights. If you want to break into Applied AI, learn it from the trenches.

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