Atlassian's Forward Deployed Engineering Playbook
Atlassian, Monday, October 5th, 2026
Atlassian's playbook draws on its forward deployed engineering work to explain the four reasons enterprise AI stalls and how to fix them.
Drawing on its Forward Deployed Engineering engagements, Atlassian outlines four recurring reasons enterprise AI stalls and what it has learned from fixing them.
Its FDEs are senior engineers who start with a business outcome and trace the people, systems, handoffs, permissions and agent requirements involved before writing production code and building agents.
The playbook advises picking frequent, painful and measurable problems, treating governance as architecture from day one, embedding AI in existing tools and workflows, and optimizing the whole system rather than individual tasks.