Principal Product Manager, Forward Deployment

BetterUp; Arlington (VA); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

BetterUp, a hybrid company with in-person collaboration, seeks a Forward Deployment lead to own the hardest accounts in our book. You’ll define what technical success means, write charters, establish gates, and determine whether we deploy at all, often working directly with CIOs, CHROs, procurement leads, and security teams.

You'll partner with engineering squads, set clear deliverables, refuse the wrong work, and protect the team from unproductive requests, ensuring value and trust for our

Job description

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.

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 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