Associate Director, Forward Deployed Product Manager

The Machine is the agentic operating system for marketing, built by Code and Theory. It plugs into the tools marketing teams use and turns disconnected workflows into a single intelligent system, connecting brand strategy, creative production, and media performance. The Machine helps power agencies across Stagwell's network and world-leading brands.

We're looking for a Lead Forward Deployed Product Manager who will provide functional leadership for a pod of 4–5 Forward Deployed Product Managers embedded across client implementations. This person sets the operating standard for how requirements, prototypes, and workflow decisions get made across every active deployment, and acts as the escalation point between the FDPM pod, Technical Account Managers, implementation engineering, and core product. This is not a reporting-line management role — pod people management sits with the Director of Product — but it is the person who sets the bar the rest of the pod works to.

They've done the individual-contributor version of this role and know where it breaks under pressure. Product-minded but still executional, they lead by example rather than by authority, and are comfortable operating at the level of a single deployment and the level of the whole pod in the same day. They're the person who builds structure and standards where none exist, then gets peers to actually use them — turning scattered patterns across deployments into a shared playbook and a steady feed of learnings back into the core product.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Set and enforce a consistent bar for requirements quality, prototyping rigor, and documentation across the pod

• Unblock FDPMs on ambiguous or contested requirements by making the call or escalating to the right owner

• Own the relationship with Technical Account Managers and implementation leads at the program level, not just per-deployment

• Review and sanity-check the workflows, prototypes, and briefs the pod produces before they reach clients or engineering

• Identify which recurring patterns across deployments are worth generalizing, and drive that handoff into the core product roadmap

• Build and maintain the shared playbook: templates, workflow patterns, prompting approaches, and documentation standards the pod reuses

• Coordinate staffing and workload across concurrent deployments, and flag capacity gaps or performance concerns to the reporting manager

• Surface pod-wide progress and blockers to product and delivery leadership

• Stay hands-on enough to step into a deployment directly when a pod member is blocked, out, or the stakes require it

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Prior experience as a forward-deployed PM, solutions consultant, or implementation lead — including having done the individual-contributor version of this work and knowing where it breaks under pressure