Top 1% FDE Masterclass

Priyanka Vergadia

FDE Leader Ex-@Google, Microsoft

Master storytelling, discovery, and scoping to become a top 1% FDE

Become the FDE customers ask for by name

I put 15 years of what I learned at Google and Microsoft into one 7-hour workshop, built to make you an exceptional Forward Deployed Engineer.

The gap

As a Software Engineer or AI Engineer, you can build agentic workflows and ship AI apps in days. Speed is the entry ticket for a good FDE.

What ends FDE careers

A CTO wants faster deployments, and you jump to CI/CD tooling.
The engineering team is uncomfortable you’re there, and you don’t notice.
Someone hands you a pre-scoped project, and you build without asking if it’s the right problem.

What wins the offer

FDE roles are everywhere. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all building this function.

The engineers getting those offers ask questions and keep going past the first answer. They figure out who does the work, who feels threatened, and what’s politically doable. They read people and org charts as carefully as code, and they leave with scoped projects.

In this workshop you will

Run real discovery conversations with enterprise customers
Navigate stakeholders who don’t all agree, and some who don’t want you there
Turn a business goal into a scoped project you can deliver

What you’ll learn

Go from engineer to FDE with the SCOPE Method: uncover problems, manage politics, define outcomes, influence without authority.

Study the customer's business, industry, and public materials before you ever speak to them
Push for the executive-level conversation anything below gives you a pre-filtered problem
Connect to business pain (revenue, cost, time) not pre-scoped deliverables

Walk the customer's full process end to end (tools, teams, bottlenecks) through their stated goal
Turn a vague ask like "ship faster" into a specific, defensible project with measurable outcomes
Build the instinct: business outcome first, technical solution second

Read the room: spot the skeptical CTO, threatened engineer, VP with the impossible timeline
Hold different conversations with IT, finance, and leadership on the same project in one week
Earn trust through curiosity ask questions instead of performing expertise

Define measurable outcomes that map directly to the customer's business goals
Sequence your toolbox: show demos, prior work, and art-of-the-possible only after context is earned
Hand off cleanly with research, projects, and outcomes already locked ready for the next discipline

Workshop agenda

What nobody teaches engineers about becoming an FDE (30 mins))
Why coding and AI skills alone won't get you there. The communication gap, the mindset shift, and why the SCOPE Method exists.
The SCOPE Method: 5-step FDE discovery framework (1 hour)
Walk through Study, Connect, Observe, People, Execute how each step builds on the last, and where most engineers skip ahead and fail.
Deep-dive into each SCOPE step with real enterprise examples (2 hours)
Live walkthroughs: desk research, pushing for the exec meeting, double-clicking a CTO's vague ask, reading stakeholder dynamics, scoping outcomes.
SCOPE Workout: run a full discovery on a real scenario (2-3 hours)
You get a customer brief. You run the full SCOPE Method research, exec conversation, double-click, stakeholder map, scoped project. No slides. Just reps.
Optional bonus Q&A bring your real FDE challenges (1 hour)
Open session to workshop your actual situations: difficult stakeholders, scoping problems, career transition questions. Top questions answered live

Learn directly from Priyanka

Priyanka Vergadia

Contact

AI & Cloud leader @Microsoft @Google | Visual Storyteller | TED Speaker

Previously at & Trusted By:

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Who this workshop is for

Software Engineers: You ship production systems but have never run customer discovery or scoped a project from a vague exec ask.
Solutions Architects Consultants: You have stakeholder skills but need the framework to own outcomes and shape projects, not just sell them.
Product Managers: You define what gets built but have never embedded with a customer's engineering team to ship it yourself.