Principal Product Manager (Forward Deployment)

• Our largest customers no longer decide on the demo
• They decide on what happens after: whether their HR systems connect, whether provisioning works, whether coaching shows up inside the tools their people already have open, whether our AI behaves the way their risk team needs it to
• Forward Deployment is the function that owns that work
• This role takes the accounts nobody has solved
• One is an eight-figure decision waiting on a commercial model that doesn’t exist yet
• On another, the champion left, the last co-creation attempt damaged trust, and we have never been able to see their usage data
• On a third, an executive told us the platform is strategic and 2% of the seats have been assigned
• On those accounts there is no charter to execute
• You write it
• That means deciding what technical success even means here, what we’ll commit to, what we’ll refuse, and whether a squad belongs on this account at all
• Some of these problems are commercial or political rather than technical, and part of the job is recognizing that early, saying so plainly, and not spending engineers on it
• You’ll do this with a squad of engineers beside you, inside the customer’s environment, on a handful of accounts whose outcomes our executive team tracks by name
• Define what technical success means on the hardest accounts in the book. You walk in without a baseline, sometimes without instrumentation and sometimes without trust, and you leave with a written charter, named gates, and a customer who believes the next thing we say
• Decide whether we deploy at all. When an account’s blocker is a pricing model, an absent executive sponsor, or an organizational fight the customer hasn’t had yet, name it, take it to the people who can move it, and keep the squad out of it. Forward Deployment earns credibility by refusing the wrong work as much as by shipping the right work
• Commit in writing, in both directions. You say what the squad will build and by when, and you say what has to be true on their side for it to matter. You are equally clear about what we will not build
• Carry the relationship at the altitude where the decision actually sits. You’ll work a CIO, a CHRO, a procurement lead, and a security architect in the same week, and you’ll be the person our own executives put in front of a customer when the account is in trouble
• Clear the technical gates on the account’s next commercial decision. The account executive owns the number. You own the gates sitting on its critical path, and you’re measured on gates cleared and on influence the deal team confirms in writing. You carry no quota, and nothing about this role changes that
• Lead a squad of two to three forward deployed engineers, and set the standard the rest of the function calibrates to. You won’t manage people. The way you write a charter, run a discovery cadence, and close out an engagement becomes how the other squads do it
• Close every engagement in writing. It graduates into the platform with core engineering’s acceptance, it converts to paid or drawdown-funded work, or you kill it. You take those decisions to a monthly graduation board and make the case for the ones worth paving into the platform
• Build the prototypes yourself. Use Claude, Cursor, Replit, and Figma Make to put something real in front of a customer before engineering spends a sprint on it. Adjust prompts, change a flow, and run your own data analysis without filing a ticket
• Own the evidence and the argument it supports. Activation and utilization deltas per account, influence claims the deal team confirms, and the pattern across accounts that tells the product organization what the platform should own and what it should stop building

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 401k
• Flexible Time Off
• Paid parental leave
• Personalized BetterUp Coach
• $360 each year for wellness programs
• Annual $1K learning and development stipend
• Equity package
• 5 volunteer days and 4 paid Inner Work™ days a year- A record of turning around an account that was going badly: trust damaged, a previous attempt failed, or a competitor already in the building
• 9+ years in product management, solutions architecture, or a forward deployed role, including several years owning the technical relationship on enterprise accounts where the contract value ran into seven or eight figures
• Credibility with executives on both sides of the table. You’ve briefed a customer’s leadership team and your own, and you’ve delivered bad news to both without losing the room
• Enterprise deployment experience and the scars that come with it. You’ve shipped against someone else’s HRIS, argued your way through a security questionnaire, waited on procurement, and watched a rollout stall because 40% of the licenses were never assigned
• Domain expertise in organizational transformation, human transformation, or talent intelligence is a plus
• Relentless agency. When something isn’t working, you own it and fix it instead of naming the team that should have. Humility about what you don’t know, and relentlessness about figuring it out anyway
• Comfort deciding on incomplete information. You listen, synthesize, decide, and move. When you’re wrong you correct fast and say so. You don’t stall waiting for consensus
• Judgment about what generalizes. You can tell the difference between a custom build worth paving into the platform and one customer’s snowflake, and you’ll argue for the distinction in front of core engineering
• Executive communication. You can walk into a quarterly business review and tell the story of what you shipped, what it moved, and what you got wrong, to an audience that includes both a CIO and a talent leader
• AI-native fluency. Prototyping with agents is your default operating method, not a novelty you bring out for demos
• Enough technical depth to be useful. You don’t need to write production code, but you should read an API doc without help, reason about a data pipeline, configure an LLM’s context and guardrails yourself, and tell an engineer when an approach won’t survive the customer’s security review
• The discipline to say no. A happy customer asking for one more thing is the hardest no in this job, and so is telling your own leadership that an account they care about isn’t a Forward Deployment problem. You can do both without damaging the relationship
• Experience in B2B2C, where you sell to an enterprise buyer and build for the people that buyer serves. The two want different things and you’ve had to hold both
• Forward deployed engineers or forward deployed PMs from companies that run this model, who have owned an account’s technical relationship end to end
• Solutions architects and sales engineers who got tired of handing off at the contract and wanted to own the build
• Founders and early employees at high-growth startups who have lived the zero-to-one journey and are comfortable without a playbook
• Consultants and implementation leads from enterprise software or professional services, where you were personally accountable for what got deployed
• PMs from enterprise SaaS whose superpower is customer intimacy rather than roadmap process