Associate Director, Forward Deployed Product Manager

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Set and enforce a consistent bar for requirements quality, prototyping rigor, and documentation across the pod
• Unblock FDPMs on ambiguous or contested requirements by making the call or escalating to the right owner
• Own the relationship with Technical Account Managers and implementation leads at the program level, not just per-deployment
• Review and sanity-check the workflows, prototypes, and briefs the pod produces before they reach clients or engineering
• Identify which recurring patterns across deployments are worth generalizing, and drive that handoff into the core product roadmap
• Build and maintain the shared playbook: templates, workflow patterns, prompting approaches, and documentation standards the pod reuses
• Coordinate staffing and workload across concurrent deployments, and flag capacity gaps or performance concerns to the reporting manager
• Surface pod-wide progress and blockers to product and delivery leadership
• Stay hands-on enough to step into a deployment directly when a pod member is blocked, out, or the stakes require it

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Prior experience as a forward-deployed PM, solutions consultant, or implementation lead — including having done the individual-contributor version of this work and knowing where it breaks under pressure
• A track record leading a workstream, initiative, or informal team in a fast-moving, client-facing environment; direct people-management experience is not required
• Strong systems thinking with the ability to spot a pattern across multiple different client contexts at once, and the judgment to make the call for the pod, not just yourself, with incomplete information
• Hands-on comfort with prototyping, prompting, and workflow design — well enough to review someone else's work critically, not just do your own
• Excellent communication skills across technical, non-technical, client-facing, and leadership audiences
• High ownership and a bias to action, with the discipline to know when to step back and let an FDPM own it
• Comfortable working directly for clients and influencing a team without a reporting line — leading by example, not authority
• Likely from a startup, SaaS, or technical services environment, with a builder/operator orientation rather than a pure roadmap PM background