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BetterUp is seeking a Principal Product Manager for Forward Deployment to own the technical strategy and customer relationships on the company's most complex, highest-value enterprise accounts. This is a senior individual contributor role (not managing people) that combines product strategy, solutions architecture, and customer leadership.
In this role, you will:
- Define what technical success means on BetterUp's hardest accounts, often starting without baselines, instrumentation, or established trust. You'll develop written charters, named gates, and restore customer confidence.
- Make go/no-go decisions on deployment. When blockers are commercial (pricing models, missing sponsors, organizational politics), you identify them early, escalate appropriately, and protect engineering resources from low-probability work.
- Commit in writing in both directions: specify what the squad will build and by when, and articulate what must be true on the customer side for success. You're equally clear about what will not be built.
- Carry relationships at the decision-making altitude. You'll interface with CIOs, CHROs, procurement leads, and security architects, and serve as the escalation point when accounts are in trouble.
- Own technical gates on the customer's critical path to their next commercial decision. You're measured on gates cleared and deal-team-confirmed influence, with no quota.
- Lead a squad of 2-3 forward-deployed engineers by example, not formal management. Your approach to charters, discovery cadences, and engagement closure becomes the standard for the function.
- Close engagements in writing: graduation into the platform with core engineering acceptance, conversion to paid/drawdown-funded work, or explicit kill decisions. You present cases monthly to a graduation board.
- Build prototypes yourself using Claude, Cursor, Replit, and Figma. Validate concepts with customers before engineering commits sprints.
- Own the evidence: track activation and utilization deltas per account, confirm influence claims with the deal team, and identify patterns that inform platform strategy.
You'll bring 9+ years in product management, solutions architecture, or forward deployment, with several years owning technical relationships on seven-to-eight-figure enterprise accounts. You have a track record of turning around troubled accounts where trust was damaged or previous attempts failed. You understand enterprise deployment deeply—HRIS integrations, security questionnaires, procurement delays, and rollout challenges. You have enough technical depth to evaluate feasibility and work alongside engineers, but your superpower is translating between customer needs, commercial constraints, and product strategy.
