Medplum let FDEs do the PM job, and the process began to break as the team grew
Medplum has no product managers: FDEs triage every customer request and feed the roadmap. Co-founder Rahul Agarwal says the weekly rotation breaks as the team grows because tickets arrive without enough customer context.
Healthcare developer platform Medplum has no dedicated product managers. Co-founder and COO Rahul Agarwal told FDE Times that forward deployed engineers triage every issue, feature request and bug, negotiate priorities, and rotate one FDE each week to present the ranked list to engineering.
That design puts FDEs on the roadmap, not only on customer go-lives. Agarwal also admits it “starts to break at scale”: once the FDE team has on the order of ten or twenty people, the on-duty presenter often lacks the customer context behind a ticket, and engineering cannot get clear answers on why a change is needed.
His proposed fix is longer ownership cycles — monthly or quarterly, tied to customer assignments — so presenters actually know the accounts behind the tickets. FDE Times and sources like Tandem and Northzone frame the deeper problem as incentives and knowledge transfer: if field learning never becomes reusable product insight, the company is running account work under an FDE title.
The practical takeaway for FDEs is to practise writing tickets a stranger can act on — who needs it, what is blocked, evidence, workaround, and what happens if it is not built — and to ask in interviews how signal from the field reaches product.
Source: fdetimes.net