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 TAKEAWAYSCharge 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.CHAPTERS00:00 - Cold open and Omaha memories01:40 - Introducing Uncommon and the May 27th Show & Tell04:55 - The trap of forums and consultant lead-gen06:43 - Why paying for a community actually works08:50 - Moderation and curation agents09:48 - Looping knowledge graphs from Karpathy to Balboa big brain12:40 - Why people really join communities14:15 - Uncommon Circles, matched groups of five17:00 - Bespoke engagement nudges20:18 - Communities for your customers22:11 - The agent is your user now24:07 - The translation layer between APIs and PMs28:24 - Forward Deployed Engineers, Palantir-style30:50 - Why FDEs alone aren't enough32:14 - Hiring an FDE at Junction35:00 - Reporting structure and engineering buy-in37:22 - Scaling the role, engineering-firstAbout 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.ioJeff Breunsbach – Head of Customer Success at Junction and Co-Founder of ChiefCustomerOfficer.io