Python might not be the best language for everything, but it’s almost certainly the second-best language for anything. - Peter Wang, PyData SV 2014¹

Ornithorhynchus anatinus, better known as the platypus, has a strong claim to the title of oddest bit of charismatic megafauna on the planet. House-cat sized, looking rather like a beaver with a duckbill grafted on, they also have the distinction of being an egg-laying mammal with venomous claws. Odd ducks² though they are, they are a successful species with major style points.

Platypodes³ also exist in the business world. They are those people with odd backgrounds, either professionally or educationally (or both), that don’t fit neatly into any particular categorization. In particular, platypodes have a STEM background (though are not necessarily CS majors) but major experience in non-engineering roles.⁴ Looked at positively, platypodes can contribute in a variety of roles, often crossing the boundaries between sales, marketing, engineering, design, and/or Management. In a culture of lean startups and lean enterprises that emphasize cross-functional teams they are cross-functional individuals. They’re perfect for starting new departments or doing things that just don’t fit elsewhere.

Platypodes, though, are rarely recognized for these positives. Instead, the typical hiring process will weed them out: they went to school too long; they aren’t focused enough; they aren’t enough of a specialist in anything; they have one of those graduate degrees incompatible with startup-life; they’re going to move onto something else in ...

Customer Success Engineering is the continuation of product development by other means. — Carl von Clausewitz (loose translation)

During my brief time at Jut, I was in marketing as a Customer Success Engineer, which also tends to be known as a Forward Deployed Engineer (and hence they will be used interchangeably throughout). At Jut, this role was under marketing, and I never gave that placement a second thought. Our role was to onboard customers, teach them Jut (and our DSL, Juttle), and basically do whatever was necessary to make them happy with our product. The unspoken corollary is that we took our observations back to Product and Engineering to improve the product/market fit.

Since the dissolution of Jut-as-I-knew-it¹ I’ve talked to several companies about this role in their organization. In almost all cases, the role reports into Sales, and may even include some sales-type KPIs, such as upselling or whatnot.² With all due respect to these companies, I believe this is a mistake. In some cases, they may just be naming (pre-) sales engineers as FDEs/CSEs; however, if they actually mean to have FDEs/CSEs as such, they should not be reporting into Sales. Doing so will gut the usefulness of this role.

I’ve never been very good at defining the difference between sales and marketing, but I think a simple definition for the purposes of this post is this: Sales is going to sell the product they’re given; marketing is going try to ...