Principal Product Manager, Forward Deployment

Let's face it, a company whose mission is human transformation better have some fresh thinking about the employer/employee relationship.

We do. We can't cram it all in here, but you'll start noticing it from the first interview.

Even our candidate experience is different. And when you get an offer from us (and accept it), you get way more than a paycheck. You get a personal BetterUp Coach, a development plan, a trained and coached manager, the most amazing team you've ever met (yes, each with their own personal BetterUp Coach), and most importantly, work that matters.

This makes for a remarkably focused and fulfilling work experience. Frankly, it's not for everyone. But for people with fire in their belly, it's a game-changing, career-defining, soul-lifting move.

Join us and we promise you the most intense and fulfilling years of your career, doing life-changing work in a fun, inventive, soulful culture.
If that sounds exciting—and the job description below feels like a fit—we really should start talking.

We are a hybrid company with a focus on in-person collaboration when necessary. Employees are expected to be available to work from one of our office hubs at least two days per week, or eight days per month. Our US hub locations include: Austin, TX; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA; and the Washington, DC metro area. If this is a role based in Europe, our Europe hub locations are London, UK and Amsterdam, NL. Please ensure you can realistically commit to this structure before applying.

The Opportunity

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.

What You Own

• 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.

What You'll Bring

• 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.

• A record of turning around an account that was going badly: trust damaged, a previous attempt failed, or a competitor already in the building.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Domain expertise in organizational transformation, human transformation, or talent intelligence is a plus.

Skills & Competencies

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Preferred Backgrounds

• 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.

• Consultants and implementation leads from enterprise software or professional services, where you were personally accountable for what got deployed.

• Founders and early employees at high-growth startups who have lived the zero-to-one journey and are comfortable without a playbook.

• PMs from enterprise SaaS whose superpower is customer intimacy rather than roadmap process.

Why This Role

• You get the accounts where the outcome is genuinely uncertain, and the authority to decide how we approach them.

• Your work sits on the critical path of decisions worth millions of dollars, and you'll know within a quarter whether it moved them.

• You'll work in the customer's environment, on their problems, with their names in your calendar. Nobody stands between you and the buyer. If that's not appealing, this isn't the right role.

• The custom work has somewhere to go. A monthly graduation board with core engineering decides what becomes a platform capability, so the thing you built for one customer can end up shipping to all of them.

• Forward Deployment is a young function with an executive mandate and unwritten rules. The person in this seat writes a meaningful share of them.

AI at BetterUp

Our team thrives at the intersection of human expertise and AI capability. As an AI-forward company, adaptation and continuous learning are part of our daily work. We're looking for teammates who are excited to evolve alongside technology – people who experiment boldly, share their discoveries openly, and help define best practices for AI-augmented work. These professionals thoughtfully integrate AI into their work to deliver exceptional results while maintaining the human judgment and creativity that drives real innovation.

Benefits:

At BetterUp, we are committed to living out our mission every day and that starts with providing benefits that allow our employees to care for themselves, support their families, and give back to their community.

• Access to BetterUp coaching; one for you and one for a friend or family member

• A competitive compensation plan with opportunity for advancement

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance

• Flexible paid time off

• Per year:

  • All federal/statutory holidays observed

  • 4 BetterUp Inner Workdays (https://www.betterup.co/inner-work)

  • 5 Volunteer Days to give back

  • Company wide Summer & Winter breaks

• Year-round charitable contribution of your choice on behalf of BetterUp

• 401(k) self contribution

We are dedicated to building diverse teams that fuel an authentic workplace and sense of belonging for each and every employee. We know applying for a job can be intimidating, please don’t hesitate to reach out — we encourage everyone interested in joining us to apply.

BetterUp Inc. provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, genetics, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status. In addition to federal law requirements, BetterUp Inc. complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.

At BetterUp, we compensate our employees fairly for their work. Base salary is determined by job-related experience, education/training, residence location, as well as market indicators. The range below is representative of base salary only and does not include equity, sales bonus plans (when applicable) and benefits. This range may be modified in the future.

The base salary range for this role is as follows:

New York City and San Francisco: $236,800 - $355,200

Austin and Arlington: $213,000 - $319,680

Protecting your privacy and treating your personal information with care is very important to us, and central to the entire BetterUp family. By submitting your application, you acknowledge that your personal information will be processed in accordance with our Applicant Privacy Notice. If you have any questions about the privacy of your personal information or your rights with regards to your personal information, please reach out to support@betterup.co