Forward Deployed Product Manager

West Monroe

About The Position

Are you ready to make an impact? At West Monroe, we believe the next generation of consulting will be built by small, highly capable teams that ship real software, solve hard problems, and create measurable value quickly. We are hiring a Senior / Principal Forward Deployed Product Manager to help build and deploy Operational Intelligence solutions for clients. This is a role for people who lead with curiosity about how work really happens; who want to spend time in the field observing operations, understanding workflows firsthand, shaping products in real environments, driving adoption, and helping turn new ideas into durable capabilities. You will work directly with clients and cross-functional teammates to deliver production-ready solutions that improve how businesses operate. One engagement might involve embedding with a client team for days, mapping how work actually flows (not how it's documented), and shaping an application that simplifies a fragmented process. Another might involve running a pilot with frontline users, catching adoption failures through direct observation, and helping client leaders understand the value created. The work is varied, fast-moving, and centered on real-world adoption. This role is best suited for someone who wants to build more than document, who treats field research as the foundation for product decisions (not a phase to get through), and who wants to help shape both client outcomes and the future of West Monroe's operational intelligence capabilities. About the role You will play a leading role in discovering user needs, shaping product direction, and driving adoption in client environments. You will work across ethnographic research, workflow design, pilot execution, stakeholder alignment, training, and handoff. You will move from field observation to synthesis to product definition to measurable business impact, often in close partnership with users, client leaders, and an engineering counterpart. You will operate as part of a small, high-autonomy deployment team paired with a forward deployed engineer. Together, you own the full client outcome. You shape what gets built; your counterpart builds it. The quality of your fieldwork upstream determines whether the product gets adopted downstream. You will also contribute to repeatable research methods, adoption playbooks, and reusable assets that can be applied across engagements. Every deployment should make the next one better. This is not just a delivery role. It is a build role; for products, for methods, and for the team's capabilities over time. By the time you have completed a few projects, you will have shaped and launched products across a wide range of environments, business problems, and operational contexts, with more variety and end-to-end ownership than many traditional product roles offer.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in product management, UX research, service design, consulting, operations transformation, or a related role with significant client-facing or field-based responsibility
Demonstrated experience conducting qualitative research in complex operational environments and translating findings into product direction and execution
Strong synthesis skills; the ability to turn extended field observation into structured models of how work flows, where value is lost, and what interventions will stick
Track record of driving technology adoption, behavior change, or rollout success with non-technical or frontline user populations
Strong facilitation, communication, and stakeholder management skills across frontline users, client core teams, and executive audiences
Experience partnering closely with engineering teams to shape and deliver technology solutions; enough technical fluency to have real conversations about feasibility, architecture, and tradeoffs
Ability to operate autonomously in fast-paced, ambiguous client environments with minimal supervision
Experience with pilot program design, phased rollouts, and adoption strategy
Willingness to travel and embed on-site with clients as needed

Nice To Haves

Comfort with ethnographic and contextual research methods in physical, distributed, or operationally complex environments; not just digital product research
Familiarity with AI or ML concepts and the ability to identify practical opportunities for intelligent automation in operational workflows
Experience in industries such as field services, logistics, construction, manufacturing, or utilities
Experience working in continuous delivery environments with fast feedback loops
Prior consulting, forward deployed, embedded, or client-facing product experience
Experience codifying research methods, service design playbooks, or operational approaches so that others can run them independently
Experience developing training materials, enablement programs, or post-launch adoption plans

Responsibilities

Conduct deep, field-based research by embedding with client teams to understand how work actually happens; shadowing operators through shifts, mapping workflows end to end, identifying pain points and workarounds, and surfacing the tacit knowledge that lives in people's heads rather than in documentation
Synthesize messy field observations into coherent models of how work flows, where real friction exists (versus where people say it exists), and what interventions will survive contact with operational reality
Design lo-fi prototypes and workflow concepts with process owners in the field; translate what you learned into product artifacts that help teams move quickly from ambiguous problems to usable solutions
Partner closely with your engineering counterpart to shape product direction, make tradeoffs, and identify where automation, AI, or intelligent tooling fits into a client's operational workflows
Lead pilot programs with real users, gather structured feedback, and refine products based on what drives adoption and value; catch adoption failures early through ongoing observation, not just dashboards
Drive research-informed training and enablement that fits users' actual mental models, so new tools are understood, trusted, and used in day-to-day operations
Measure and communicate business impact by baselining current performance, tracking outcomes, and helping stakeholders understand the value created
Support successful handoff by building adoption roadmaps, documentation, and internal client capability to sustain and expand usage after deployment
Contribute deployment learnings back to the platform and methods teams: recurring workflow patterns, missing capabilities, templates that should be codified, approaches that worked and approaches that did not
Help build and refine service design playbooks, discovery methods, and adoption approaches that other team members can run independently