One engineer for every two accounts is the cap on your revenue.

Gravel raises the ratio: your team, your client, and a crew of agents take pilots to production — and everything learned in the field ships back into your product.

Request a demo →See the motion ↓
Fig. 01 · The forward deployed motion — bespoke work hardens into product.

The constraint, in numbers.

Table 01 · The economics of forward deploymentUSD
Fully loaded cost of one forward deployed engineer$250–400K1
Active accounts carried per engineer, typical1 : 22
Growth in FDE job postings, Jan–Sep 2025+800%3
1–3 · Industry reporting. Sources on request.
Capacity
One engineer carries two accounts.
One person supervises six engagements.
Conversion
Pilots stall for months behind a human.
Blockers get chased on both sides, daily.
Memory
Every engagement reinvents the playbook.
Every engagement writes the playbook for the next.

From signed to shipped.

Gravel reads the traffic an engagement already produces and turns it into four systems both sides work from. Nothing gets retyped from one tool into another.

Gravel reads
  • Client email
  • Slack & Teams channels
  • Meeting notes & transcripts
  • Docs
  • Past tickets
Agents keep current
Tickets & tasks
Every request captured, assigned, and tracked.
Timeline
What ships when, and what slipped.
Knowledge base
Decisions and context, written as they happen.
Goals
The numbers the deal was sold on.

All four shared with the client by default — same board, same dates, same numbers. Agents keep them current; your team approves what the client sees. Nobody writes the weekly status email again.

  1. Phase ILearn

    A deal signs. Gravel connects to client email, shared Slack and Teams channels, and meeting transcripts — and learns the goals, the stakeholders, and where the work stands.

    engagement map

  2. Phase IIPilot

    Agents work the engagement beside your team and the client's. Every request gets captured; every status stays current.

    every ask on the board
    Exhibit A · The delivery board. Your team sees agents and people working tickets side by side, decisions waiting on you at the top.
    Gravel delivery board: decisions waiting on you, plus tickets assigned to agents and people across backlog, in progress, review, and done.

  3. Phase IIIProve

    The goals you sold become a shared scoreboard, tracked by agents and signed off by your team.

    signed-off numbers
    Exhibit B · The client portal. Your client sees milestones, metrics, and one open ask. Same state, two views — no task soup.
    Gravel client portal: live status headline, milestone checklist, and one open ask for credentials.

  4. Phase IVPave

    What the field learned doesn't stay in the field. Requirements and lessons distill into product requests, filed to your backlog and internal knowledge base.

    next one starts warm

Every deployment paves the next one.

Every engagement starts where the last one ended.

Productization queue · exampleQ3
Zendesk ticket-to-record transformrequested in 4 of 6 engagements→ absorb into core
SSO handshake for legacy IdPsrequested in 3 of 6 engagements→ candidate
Nightly reconciliation runbookreused 9× from the knowledge base→ template, done

Requests are counted, ranked, and handed to your product team. Your engagement data never crosses tenant lines.

Headcount you didn’t have to hire.

Your engineers stay in Linear, Jira, and GitHub. Two-way sync means the board fills itself.

Built for two security reviews.

Scoped ingestion
Gravel reads only the sources you connect. Every connection is scoped to one engagement, logged, and revocable.
Your keys
Bring your own model keys. Your accounts, your data agreements.
Hard isolation
No cross-tenant learning. Ever. By architecture, not policy.
Client-side control
Clients see what’s connected and permission their own surface. The portal shows what you publish.

You run a deployment team.

Make every engineer carry three times the road — a crew of agents, a board that fills itself, a knowledge base that compounds.

You can’t hire one yet.

Run the motion the giants run. One sharp person plus Gravel is a deployment function.

The best software companies were built on gravel roads.

We’re onboarding design partners and instrumenting their motion for the first Deployment Operations benchmark.

Join the benchmark →
Design partners get the benchmark report first, free.

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