Responsibilities

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.

Principal Product Manager, Forward Deployment at Betterup · LumiJobs

Principal Product Manager, Forward Deployment

Responsibilities

Qualification

Preferred

Benefits

Company

Betterup

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