As tech companies move to expand forward deployed engineer (FDE) teams as part of their push into the enterprise AI market, audio AI company ElevenLabs stresses that FDE organisations should sit under product, not sales.

ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski (마티 스타니셰프스키) shared the view in an interview with David Senra, who runs the Founders podcast focused on conversations with entrepreneurs.

Staniszewski said many companies now run FDE organisations, but at ElevenLabs the FDE function belongs to product rather than sales. He said that is because FDEs play a role in deeply understanding the product roadmap.

Staniszewski laid out 2 goals for FDEs. One is to solve problems customers face and expand the product in that direction. The other is to bring the knowledge gained in the process back into the product.

He said, "The product has to be better for the next generation of customers too. But companies often miss this part," adding, "Everyone does the hard integration work and solves problems, but if you do not do the second step of bringing the specialised expertise you learned back into the product, you can only end up staying in the service business."

Asked if he meant that information gained through trial and error can be spread to other customers as well, Staniszewski replied yes.

He said, "In simple cases, you build one integration feature and have all customers use it. In areas like healthcare, you need to go one step further. After you deploy once, you need to pre-optimise the product experience for that domain so that when you deal with the next customer in the same industry, you do not have to start over from scratch."

Asked by the host whether that amounts to using the customer base as a kind of research and development (R&D) tool, he said, "Yes," adding, "The more you understand a specific domain, the faster R&D itself becomes. It is very rare that a problem one company faces is unique to that company alone."

Staniszewski also highlighted that the structure works in a way that benefits everyone. He said, "You work with one customer, learn, and reflect it in the product experience. You work with another customer, learn again, and reflect it again. Both customers benefit from the improved product," before adding, "Domain expertise itself still belongs to the customer," and stressing, "Customers can win in competition with the domain expertise they have. But the product experience built on that expertise can be abstracted and reused."