CAW
Website:
cawstudios.com
Job details:
Our organization deploys Forward Deployed Teams (FDTs) that embed directly with enterprise customers of AI and SaaS platform companies. These teams mine use cases, build POCs, move them to production, and drive adoption - while feeding structured product insights back to the platform company’s product team.
We are seeking a sharp, customer-facing Product Manager to lead the product side of a two-person Forward Deployed Team. You will be paired with an Implementation Engineer and deployed on-site with a customer of one of our partner companies. Your job is to become the customer’s trusted advisor, discover the highest-impact problems their business faces, translate those into structured specs, and drive end-to-end delivery and adoption.
This is not a traditional PM role. You won’t be managing a backlog for a single product. You’ll be embedded inside a customer’s organization — sitting with their functional leaders, understanding their workflows, and figuring out how the platform you represent can solve real problems. Think of it as a startup founder’s job: find the problem, define the solution, get it built, make sure it sticks.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Immersion
- Spend the first 2–3 weeks deeply learning the partner company’s platform — architecture, APIs, capabilities, known limitations, competitive positioning, and existing customer use cases.
- Become fluent enough to demo the platform, answer technical questions from the customer’s team, and independently identify which customer problems map to platform capabilities.
- Build relationships with the partner company’s product and engineering teams. You will be their eyes and ears on the ground.
Use Case Mining
- Embed on-site with the customer. Sit with functional leaders across departments - operations, finance, CX, supply chain, HR - to understand their workflows, pain points, and priorities.
- Don’t wait for requirements to be handed to you. Proactively identify problems that can be solved with the platform. Prioritize ruthlessly based on business impact, technical feasibility, and speed to value.
- Run structured discovery sessions. Map workflows. Document undocumented processes. Find the use cases the customer doesn’t even know they have.
- Build a use case pipeline: a ranked, living backlog of opportunities that you and the customer’s leadership review regularly.
Solution Design & Delivery
- Translate discovered use cases into structured specs that the Implementation Engineer can build against - clear problem statements, acceptance criteria, scope boundaries, and success metrics. •
- Work in tight 2–4 week cycles: spec a use case, get alignment from the customer, hand off to the engineer for a working POC, validate with stakeholders, then move to production.
- Own delivery timelines, customer expectations, and escalations. You are the single point of accountability the customer sees.
- Ensure what gets built is what gets used. Drive adoption by working with the customer’s end users, running training sessions, and instrumenting usage metrics.
Product Feedback Loop
- Surface structured insights back to the partner company’s product team: feature gaps, integration friction, customer objections, competitive signals, and use case patterns that should become product features.
- This is not a dump of Slack messages. You deliver actionable, prioritized field intelligence that directly informs product roadmap decisions.
- Flag when a customer asks is a one-off vs. when it’s a pattern that multiple customers would benefit from. Protect the product from fragmentation.
Customer Relationship & Trust
- You represent the partner company’s brand inside the customer’s organization. Build deep trust with functional leaders and CXOs.
- Know when to push (the customer is avoiding a hard decision) and when to listen (there’s a real constraint you haven’t understood yet).
- Manage stakeholders who have competing priorities. Align them around a shared roadmap of use cases and expected outcomes.
What We’re Looking For
- 5–7 years of experience in a customer-facing product role: Product Manager, Business Analyst, Solutions Consultant, or Forward Deployed Engineer at a SaaS/AI company.
- Proven ability to run discovery with enterprise customers — not just take requirements, but mine problems and shape solutions.
- Strong speccing discipline: you can write a clear, buildable spec with acceptance criteria that an engineer can work from without ambiguity.
- Technical fluency (not necessarily coding): you understand APIs, data flows, system architecture, and can hold a meaningful conversation with engineers and CTOs.
- Comfort with ambiguity. You will walk into customer organizations with no playbook. You need to figure out what matters, fast.
- Excellent communication: you can translate between a non-technical business leader and an engineer in the same meeting.
- Willingness to be on-site with the customer. This is an embedded role, not a remote one.
- Experience with AI/ML platforms, chatbot platforms, automation tools, or enterprise SaaS is strongly preferred.
- A bias toward doing, not analyzing. You are measured by use cases shipped to production, not decks presented.
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