This week was Rippling on the Road — our premier customer conference, where we get to put the latest and greatest innovations across HR, Finance, and IT in front of the people who actually use them.
Of course AI took center stage. It’s the story everyone wants to hear right now, and we had plenty to show. But the thing that was nearest and dearest to my heart was Rippling Solutions, brought to you by Rippling FDE.
Let me back up and explain what that even means, because “FDE” still gets blank stares in a lot of rooms.
Rippling’s mission is to free smart people to work on hard problems. I’ve yet to find anything that embodies that better than our Forward Deployed Engineering org. We’re customer-facing software engineers — and I mean customer-facing in the most literal sense. We own everything from discovery to delivery. We sit shoulder-to-shoulder with our most important customers on their most strategic problems, and we don’t stop until the job is done.
Here’s the part people don’t expect. We don’t ship software at you. We build it with you. We iterate in lockstep with your team — week after week, build after build — until what we’ve made is the exact app you’ve been dreaming about. Not a close-enough template you have to bend your business around. The real thing, shaped to the way you actually work.
At the conference, I got to share the stage with three brilliant people — Melissa Burckhardt, Michael Freer, and Divya Balakrishnan — who walked through exactly what that partnership felt like from the other side of the table. They talked about the custom apps we built together, and the problems those apps quietly took off their plates.
And then came the part I keep thinking about.
The automation we introduced hasn’t eliminated a single role. Not one. Instead, it freed their teams up — and they used that freedom to promote people into more meaningful work, pointing their best talent at the harder, more interesting problems that had been sitting on the back burner. That’s the version of automation nobody puts on a slide, and it’s the one I’m proudest of.
I also got to shoot a documentary this week, diving into all the incredible work the FDE org has done to date — the customers, the builds, the wins. I won’t spoil it. Just be on the lookout for that when it drops. 🎬
So let me say it once more, because it’s the whole point: we free smart people to work on hard problems.
I was the first FDE here. The team is now breezing past twenty, and through all of that growth, the mission has never wavered. We exist to enable the success of our customers — which, when you strip everything else away, is the truest form of FDE there is.
Let’s go Rippling, and let’s go FDE. 🚀