Forward Deployed Product Manager

Higharc is a VC-backed startup changing how new homes are designed and built. The Forward Deployed Product Manager will work directly with a large production homebuilder to transform unstructured plan catalogs into structured, queryable product data, define product capabilities, validate data quality, and deliver actionable analytics in partnership with engineering and client teams.

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