Reflections from Palantir and principles for building adaptive organizations
This is simply a personal reflection. Not a how-to guide or claim of expertise.
There's been growing interest in Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) model and whether it represents a template for how teams should organize going forward.
While I don't think most companies should completely copy Palantir's model, after spending the first chapter of my career there, I developed a set of beliefs about organizational philosophy & design that feel increasingly relevant as AI reshapes both the problems we solve and the systems we build to solve them.
This reflection is a distillation of patterns that, for me, point toward how adaptive organizations can be built as we move forward.
Collapse the distance to complexity
Most organizations shield their technical teams from real-world complexity. Problems get translated into requirements documents, tickets, and process. The more ambiguous the problem, the more layers get added to simplify it for downstream execution.
The Forward Deployed model inverted that. Engineers sat directly inside the complexity - embedded with customers, often onsite, for months or years. They didn't just read about the problem. They experienced it.
Close proximity to problems surfaced context that documents never fully capture:
- The incentive structures quietly driving behavior,
- The human friction points that determine adoption,
- The widely adopted technical workarounds to overcome legacy system shortcomings,
- The political constraints shaping organizational dynamics.
Novel problems can rarely be solved from afar. You have to collapse distance between builders and reality.
Deploying the right people to solve the right problems
Palantir deliberately hired for spike - seeking people who were exceptional at certain things, even if they weren't strong in every dimension a traditional role might expect. But spike did not mean narrow specialization. Most FDEs were interdisciplinary, with spikes emerging from a combination of multiple skills & traits that, together, created unique capabilities. Importantly, this was paired with enough humility to recognize where they were less effective.
This blend of awareness in their strengths and openness about their limitations allowed them to collaboratively and creatively tackle complex challenges.
But what made the model work wasn't simply finding exceptionally strong people. It was deploying them against ambiguous, but real, problems, aligned to their strengths, while giving them space to figure out how they uniquely could best contribute.
This allowed their core strengths to create significant leverage for the company.
Adaptive deployment is explicit - continuously aligning people to the right problems
Matching people's evolving strengths to the evolving problem surface requires ongoing, deliberate effort.
Palantir had a dedicated resourcing team exclusively tasked with maintaining a strong understanding of individuals’ strengths and the current needs & priorities across the business, so they could continuously map people to the right problems. This was not just a typical HR function; it was a powerful internal unit that worked directly with executives and company leadership to ensure that the right people were continuously deployed against the right problems.
In some cases, this meant reassigning individuals mid-project if their strengths aligned better to a higher-leverage problem elsewhere, even if that decision temporarily destabilized existing projects.
When priorities shifted - whether due to technological breakthroughs, global shocks, or critical customer needs - having this adaptive capacity allowed the organization to rapidly reorient significant portions of its talent toward the highest-impact challenges.
The adaptability wasn't accidental. It was a designed organizational capacity.
Self-awareness doesn’t emerge automatically - it must be intentionally surfaced
Palantir's scale and long time horizons provided surface area for people to discover their strengths over time, across multiple projects. But most organizations in today’s environment, especially smaller ones, don't have that luxury to wait for people to stumble into their spikes organically.
Leaders going forward should actively help their people surface self-awareness: observing how they work, noticing where they thrive, having ongoing conversations about energy, strengths, and problem fit.
It’s not just about knowing what hard skills people have, but also understanding how they naturally decompose problems, navigate complexity, and operate inside ambiguity. This becomes increasingly important for adaptive teams in complex environments.
Growth compounds when significant responsibility aligns with emerging strengths
Personal growth rarely came through titles or promotions at Palantir. It came through ownership of increasingly consequential problems aligned to one’s strengths.
The organization often took calculated bets on people - sometimes young and unproven - based on hypotheses about where their strengths could create leverage against specific problem sets.
Growth wasn't just more work. It was ownership of problems calibrated to stretch the person while giving the organization its best shot at upside.
Teams that compound over time make these bets thoughtfully, aligning emerging spikes with real ownership opportunities.
Designing for leverage from the start
As AI reshapes not just the products we create but also the systems and cultures we build to create them, there's an opportunity to fundamentally rethink organizational design.
Much of what worked at Palantir in my opinion came down to leverage:
- Leverage by collapsing distance to complexity,
- Leverage by deploying the right people to the right problems,
- Leverage by designing adaptive resourcing systems that allow people to move where they're needed most,
- Leverage by cultivating a culture of strong self-awareness,
- Leverage by growing people through ownership of meaningful problems.
The more intentional leaders are about learning where their people create leverage, matching them to the right kinds of problems, and giving them space to adapt as those problems evolve, the more resilient and adaptive their organizations become.
Palantir had the time, capital, and scale to discover many of these dynamics organically or even by accident. Most organizations building going forward won't. Which is why - especially in an AI-driven world with increasing complexity - these principles will need to be designed for intentionally.