Principal Product Manager (Forward Deployment)

Join BetterUp, a leading platform for professional coaching and mental health support. As a Principal Product Manager in Forward Deployment, you will tackle complex accounts, define technical success, and drive customer relationships at the executive level. You will lead a squad of engineers, build prototypes, and own the evidence and argument for product development. This role offers a competitive salary, equity package, and a range of benefits including medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401k, flexible time off, and more.

• Define what technical success means on the hardest accounts in the book, and 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.
• 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, but your work will influence how the other squads do it.

• 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