Services and field engineering teams for startups, built from the ground up or built around the people you already have.
Most startups find out they need a services team the week their first enterprise customer signs. Someone technical has to get that customer live and seeing value. Too often that lands on your sales engineers or product leaders, who already have full-time jobs and aren't services specialists.
I've spent more than twenty years building professional services and field engineering organizations from the ground up, at AppDynamics, Prophecy and Elementum AI among others. Fieldeng Advisory takes that work off your plate, so your engineers go back to building and selling and your customers get to value sooner.
Usually one of these is already happening
You're starting from nothing
We work out who to hire first, what they need to be able to do, and how they'll deliver, so your first customers achieve the outcomes they bought and don't stop at go-live.
Your sales engineers are doing delivery on the side
That's normal early on. As you grow, it pulls them away from winning deals and slows your customers down. We decide who should own what at your current stage and at the next one. We also look at where partners can extend your team, so your sales engineers get back to selling and your product team gets back to building.
Your services model needs a financial plan
We build a services roadmap that fits your finance strategy, whether that means investing in services to drive subscription growth or showing investors a path to breakeven. I'll help you price your services at market rates and set competitive pay for each role you hire, so your margins hold up as the team grows.
You need a services leader now, not in six months
Your first services leader may be months away, and your customers can't wait. I can work alongside you as an advisor on strategy, or step in as a fractional VP and drive it for an agreed term. Either way, I build the key infrastructure (offerings, delivery process, metrics and hiring) while leaving room for your future leader's vision. A clean handoff is part of the work.
Where I've done this
- Elementum AI
Built the delivery team from 6 people to 30, scaling it as the business grew.
- Prophecy
Rebuilt professional services in about a year: packaged offerings that deliver the same way every time, recurring services revenue, a migration practice for the SAP OEM partnership, and a delivery partner network. By the end, services was getting pulled into deals early instead of being called once the contract was signed.
- Twilio
Owned the offerings for every customer-facing technical team behind Segment: professional services, customer success, education and support.
- Databricks
Ran services for the communications, media and entertainment vertical, a multi-million-dollar portfolio of data and AI projects, and allocated its services investment budget.
- AppDynamics
Turned the technical help that Customer Success gave away for free into the company's first paid professional services team, built the Americas services team, and ran a solutions architecture group of more than twenty.
- AWS
Managed sales through AWS Marketplace for every vendor in the observability space. It was a partner sales role rather than a services one, so I have also seen how startups in the same category buy and sell through a partner, not only how they deliver once the deal is done.
I've seen the same few problems at nearly every company I've worked with. The first customer's implementation turns into a custom project because the best sales engineer quietly became the delivery lead, and by the time anyone looks, services is either being given away or eating margin.
Most engagements are short, whether I'm advising or leading. You end up with hiring profiles, a delivery approach your team can run once I'm gone, and the numbers to back it up when your board asks.
The first call is free. Even if we never work together, you should hang up knowing what to build first.
Tell me where you are
Tell me about your product, your first customers and who does the technical work today. I will reply within a day to set up a time.