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Adam Ward: evaluation

9 Aug 2026 Lenny's Podcast The playbook for building high-talent-density teams | Adam Ward, Head of Talent at Cursor

“Because I think you almost see this squeezing together of engineer product design in some ways where we would love a designer who could actually be more of a design engineer.”

— Adam Ward

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Speaker
Adam Ward
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
9 Aug 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seat stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. What are roles that are kind of trending up in the most in demand right now? And what are maybe less and less in demand? And you have a really unique perspective because not only you're at Cursor now, but before that you had your own independent agency working with a ton of different companies. So you got to see across a lot of different places. What's kind of trending up? What's most in demand and what's maybe softer now? Yeah, I think one thing that's really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but this forward-deployed engineer, this technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what can be for some audiences in a company, a very technical and maybe overwhelming product or helping companies think about moving from token maxing to optimizing, maxing to optimizing. And so that's I think a new skill as CFOs start to get the bill coming in. Companies are able to help partner with them to think about what's the best solution for them. So that's a really unique skill because you're deeply technical yourself, you understand the product, but you can also walk into a room with executives and leaders and help conjugate some of that and then even help them deploy that into their workforce. So I think that's a real supply demand issue right now. I think maybe the thing that is waning, I would say, is the specialized technical person. The person who is... Because I think you almost see this squeezing together of engineer product design in some ways where we would love a designer who could actually be more of a design engineer. And we want that super deep technical engineer that has a little bit more stronger product sense. So I think the people who are maybe very narrow, very deep and overly specialized in a way are waning in the same way along that vein might also be the new grad who just hasn't had enough experience to be able to do that, where a product like Cursor or others can do some of that work right now. This is extremely interesting. I haven't heard it put this way before. Interestingly with the FDE role, it feels similar to the mobile example you shared where very few people have actually been forward-deployed engineers. So what's kind of the, I don't know, the look of a person that can become an FDE?…

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