Bolo AI is a technology startup headquartered in Palo Alto, backed by True Ventures, Benchstrength, Accomplice, J Ventures, and Beat Ventures. This hybrid, customer-facing role is built for hands-on ownership: you will help drive measurable customer engagement outcomes while shaping reusable product and delivery patterns as the company scales. Expect flexible collaboration between home and in-person work, a Palo Alto office for team connection, and equity so your impact grows alongside the business.
What you’ll own
As a Forward Deployed Product Manager, you will own customer engagements from problem discovery through shipped impact. The goal is to translate messy workflows into a clear MVP scope and product requirements, then work through adoption so the delivered solution becomes part of real day-to-day operations.
- Own customer engagements from discovery through deployment, adoption, and measurable impact
- Build credibility with customer stakeholders across field teams, technical teams, executives, and commercial buyers
- Immerse yourself in customer reality through their data and their day-to-day workflows
- Translate ambiguous customer problems into clear problem statements, MVP scope, data requirements, user stories, and product requirements
- Partner with engineering to turn customer workflows and datasets into stable, extensible AI-powered solutions
- Manage tradeoffs across customer urgency, technical complexity, commercial value, and long-term product reuse
- Scope phased deployments that create value quickly without creating unsustainable custom work
- Lead customer rollout and adoption so shipped solutions become part of real workflows
- Stay close to expansion, renewal, and commercial outcomes, not only delivery milestones
- Identify repeatable patterns across engagements and turn them into product and delivery processes as Bolo scales
What you bring
- 6–8+ years in a high-ownership, customer-facing role such as consulting, forward-deployed product, enterprise software implementation, solutions, technical delivery, product management, or business operations
- A record of running complex client-facing work under ambiguity, including scoping, stakeholder alignment, tradeoff management, and driving to a concrete outcome
- Strong commercial judgment, connecting customer success, expansion, renewal, and product direction
- Strong technical fluency to reason through data, integrations, AI workflows, implementation constraints, and tradeoffs with engineers
- Clear product judgment: define MVP scope, write clear requirements, make prioritization tradeoffs, and distinguish customer-specific requests from reusable product patterns (direct PM experience not required)
- Excellent communication across executives, operators, engineers, and data teams, including the ability to push back constructively
- Proven ability to operate in a very early-stage startup environment with low structure, high ambiguity, fast context switching, and no perfect playbook
- Real curiosity about AI, including active experimentation and critical thinking about where AI tools work, where they fail, and what reliability in production requires
- Exposure to energy, oil and gas, heavy industry, applied AI/ML, or LLM-based products is a strong plus
Benefits and working style
- Competitive Compensation: a strong base salary
- Ownership & Impact: equity options
- Hybrid Work Environment: flexible hybrid schedule with in-person collaboration and work from home
- Growth & Opportunity: join at a pivotal stage where your contributions directly affect Bolo’s journey, with opportunities that grow as the company scales
- Generous PTO
- Office in Palo Alto for in-person collaboration
Role location and travel
This role can be based in Palo Alto, CA or Houston, TX. In either location, it is an in-person, customer-facing role. You should expect regular team collaboration, customer meetings, on-site discovery, and travel. Travel will vary by customer phase and may reach up to 50% during intensive discovery, deployment, or expansion periods.
What success looks like
- Help pilots become must-have deployments by creating clear, measurable customer value
- Build trust with customers, engineering, GTM, and the founding team through clarity and outcome-driven delivery
- Turn customer-specific learning into reusable product and delivery patterns
What Bolo offers
In addition to competitive compensation and equity, Bolo AI offers generous PTO, flexible working hours, an office in Palo Alto for in-person collaboration, and benefits aligned to life in an early-stage technology startup.
