Forward Deployed Product Manager

About the role

You will embed directly with a large production homebuilder to turn their sprawling, unstructured plan catalog into reliable, queryable product data. This role is a founding engagement for a new Forward Deployed team where you define what gets built in the field. You will own the discovery, structure, and validation of plan assets in partnership with division teams on the ground. Expect to work closely with architects and builders to translate messy plan sets into clean, searchable information. You will define the product vision for search, analytics, and AI-assisted classification directly with real users. This position requires comfort with ambiguity and a willingness to ship working capabilities quickly rather than perfect theoretical models. You will be responsible for demonstrating tangible business value through quantifiable reductions in catalog redundancy and improved data usability.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Embed with HQ, regional, and division teams to run discovery - locate plan assets, establish source of truth, and document how each division represents its plans and where variation originates.
• Own product definition for the searchable plan library, analytics dashboard, and agent-enabled search - what a good query looks like, what a useful answer looks like, and what "structured for analysis" actually means.
• Tune Higharc's Autotranslate AI to identify, categorize, and translate floorplans into data.
• Work hands-on with the data: query the structured plan library directly, build against our internal APIs, and ship working capability back to users rather than filing a ticket and waiting.
• Define acceptance criteria for delivery milestones - coverage targets, data-field completeness, QA error thresholds - and hold the line on them when schedule pressure argues otherwise.
• Frame and defend quantifiable ROI: redundancy across a catalog, dimensional spread on repeated conditions, consolidation candidates, and the purchasing leverage each one represents.
• Partner with Forward Deployed Engineering, the Technical Lead, QA, Intake Specialists, and Client Strategy, and present progress and tradeoffs to executive stakeholders.
• Capture the playbooks, artifacts, and data patterns that let the forward deployed model carry over to the next engagement.

Requirements

You have 5+ years of product management experience, including significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings - enterprise implementations, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services. You are comfortable being handed a scope that is 70% specified and a data set nobody has structured before. You possess hands-on technical fluency, including writing SQL, working in notebooks, scripting against APIs, and interrogating a data set yourself rather than requesting a pull. You know the difference between a demo and a deliverable, and you are honest with customers about which one they are looking at. You have a track record defining structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and getting a business to actually adopt them. You have excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive stakeholders who have limited time and no patience for status without substance. You are willing to travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time. You can work remotely across the continental United States while maintaining rigorous collaboration with distributed teams. You understand that execution speed must be balanced with sound judgment about data quality and what level of accuracy a decision requires.

Nice to have

A background in residential construction, homebuilding, architecture, or AEC technology - especially fluency with plan sets, elevations, options, and how builders manage plan variation. Experience with agent-based or agentic systems and how they interface with structured data environments.

Practical notes

This role requires travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time. You must be located within the continental United States to be eligible for this position.