EP017 Uncommon Circles, Moderation Agents & The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer

Jay and Jeff get into the weeds on two of the biggest questions in CS right now: how to build a community that doesn't devolve into spam and consultant pitches, and how the Forward Deployed Engineer role is reshaping who actually sits in front of customers. Plus what Junction is learning about building a product for agents, not just humans. KEY TAKEAWAYS Charge for the community. Paying members self-filter out the people trying to mine the network for leads and consulting work. Moderation should be agentic. A moderation agent plus a content-curation agent replaces the old volunteer-mod model. Looping knowledge graphs compound. Balboa's "big brain" updates a markdown knowledge base after every call. That corpus gets exponentially more valuable over time. Uncommon Circles. After 60 days, members get matched into a group of five, deliberately diverse on industry and stage. The agent is your end user. If you sell a developer product, the code is being written by Claude. CLIs, MCPs, and clean API docs matter more than slick UI. CSM + FDE, not CSM-as-FDE. Don't commandeer "forward deployed" for CS. CSM owns relationship and commercials; FDE owns the technical solution. Hire FDEs engineering-first. Palantir's formula: 20% sales, 30% product, 50% engineering. Customer-facing polish is last. CHAPTERS 00:00 - Cold open and Omaha memories 01:40 - Introducing Uncommon and the May 27th Show & Tell 04:55 - The trap of forums and consultant lead-gen 06:43 - Why paying for a community actually works 08:50 - Moderation and curation agents 09:48 - Looping knowledge graphs from Karpathy to Balboa big brain 12:40 - Why people really join communities 14:15 - Uncommon Circles, matched groups of five 17:00 - Bespoke engagement nudges 20:18 - Communities for your customers 22:11 - The agent is your user now 24:07 - The translation layer between APIs and PMs 28:24 - Forward Deployed Engineers, Palantir-style 30:50 - Why FDEs alone aren't enough 32:14 - Hiring an FDE at Junction 35:00 - Reporting structure and engineering buy-in 37:22 - Scaling the role, engineering-first About the Show: Chief Customer Officer Podcast is a show about real strategies for customer-led growth in the AI era—from leaders actually executing, not just talking about it. Your Hosts: Jay Nathan – CEO of Balboa Solutions and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io Jeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io