Forward Deployed Product Manager

Higharc is a VC-backed startup that is changing how new homes are designed and built. They are seeking a hands-on Forward Deployed Product Manager to turn a large production homebuilder's unstructured plan catalog into structured, queryable product data.

Responsibilities:

• 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:

• 5+ years of product management experience, including significant time in customer-facing or deployed settings—enterprise implementations, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or professional services
• Hands-on technical fluency: you write SQL, work in notebooks, script against APIs, and interrogate a data set yourself rather than requesting a pull
• Experience prototyping to validate ideas quickly using tools like Cursor, Replit, or V0.dev
• A track record defining structured data models, taxonomies, or classification schemes and getting a business to actually adopt them
• Strong judgment about data quality—what level of accuracy a decision requires, and what it costs to get there
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including with executive stakeholders who have limited time and no patience for status without substance
• Willingness to travel to client sites and company events up to 30% of the time
• 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 natural-language search over structured data, RAG systems, or LLM-powered analytics
• Exposure to geometric or spatial data—CAD/BIM, computer vision on drawings, similarity and clustering methods
• Experience with large, messy, enterprise-scale data migrations or ingestion programs
• Experience building a function from zero: first hire into a new team, new practice, or new delivery model