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Salary: USD 180,000 - 225,000 / annual
BetterUp is seeking a Staff Product Manager for Forward Deployment, a function that owns the technical success and deployment strategy for the company's most complex, high-value enterprise accounts. This is a high-autonomy role where you define what technical success means on accounts nobody has solved yet—some worth eight figures, others blocked by commercial, political, or organizational factors rather than technical ones.
You will own the full technical relationship on a handful of named accounts that the executive team tracks closely. Your responsibilities include: defining technical success and writing charters without a baseline; deciding whether to deploy at all when blockers are commercial or political; committing in writing to what the squad will build and what must be true on the customer's side; carrying relationships at the executive level (CIO, CHRO, procurement, security); clearing technical gates on the account's critical path; leading a squad of two to three forward-deployed engineers by example (not managing them); closing engagements in writing with graduation to platform, paid work, or drawdown; building prototypes yourself using Claude, Cursor, Replit, and Figma; and owning the evidence—activation/utilization deltas, influence claims, and patterns that inform the product organization.
You will work in the customer's environment on their problems, with direct access to buyers and no intermediaries. Forward Deployment is a young function with an executive mandate and unwritten rules; you will write a meaningful share of them. The custom work has a path: a monthly graduation board with core engineering decides what becomes a platform capability.
BetterUp is a hybrid company expecting in-person collaboration at least two days per week (or eight days per month) at office hubs in Austin, NYC, San Francisco, or DC (or London/Amsterdam for Europe-based roles).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years in product management, solutions architecture, or forward deployment roles, including several years owning the technical relationship on enterprise accounts with seven- to eight-figure contract values
- Proven track record turning around accounts that were going badly (damaged trust, failed previous attempts, competitor already in place)
- Enterprise deployment experience: shipping against third-party HRIS, navigating security questionnaires, managing procurement delays, troubleshooting rollout stalls
- Technical depth sufficient to read API docs independently, reason about data pipelines, configure LLM context and guardrails, and advise engineers on security implications
- Credibility with executives on both sides of the table; experience briefing customer and internal leadership and delivering bad news without losing the room
- B2B2C experience where you sell to enterprise buyers and build for end users with different needs
- Domain expertise in organizational transformation, human transformation, or talent intelligence is a plus
KEY COMPETENCIES:
- Relentless agency and humility; you own problems and fix them rather than naming the team that should have
- Discipline to say no—to happy customers asking for more and to your own leadership when an account isn't a Forward Deployment problem
- Judgment about what generalizes; ability to distinguish custom builds worth paving into the platform from snowflakes
- Executive communication; ability to tell the story of what you shipped, what it moved, and what you got wrong
- AI-native fluency; prototyping with agents is your default method
- Comfort deciding on incomplete information; you listen, synthesize, decide, and move fast, correcting course when wrong
PREFERRED BACKGROUNDS:
- Forward deployed engineers or PMs from companies running this model, owning account technical relationships end-to-end
- Solutions architects and sales engineers who wanted to own the build beyond contract handoff
- Consultants and implementation leads from enterprise software or professional services with personal accountability for deployed outcomes
- Founders and early employees at high-growth startups comfortable without a playbook
- Enterprise SaaS PMs whose superpower is customer intimacy over roadmap process
