Principal Product Manager – Customer-Deployed

About the role

ICIS is creating its first forward‑deployed product team and this role will lead that effort. You will work directly with chemicals customers to define, validate and deliver high‑value, customer‑embedded solutions, guiding initiatives from discovery through pilots and scalable patterns.

Key responsibilities

• Lead two to three active forward‑deployed initiatives with named chemicals customers at any one time.
• Deliver the first working proof of concept to a customer within 60 days of joining.
• Drive the first paid pilot to go live within one quarter.
• Own the squad’s discovery and delivery rhythm, ensuring weekly customer engagement.
• Maintain a live discovery view for every initiative.
• Act as the taste gate for all outputs, ensuring no PRD is created without a working proof of concept.
• Make decisions to kill, pivot, or promote discovery tracks based on evidence and customer value.
• Create documented playbooks and enablement materials for Sales and central productisation teams when patterns are validated.

Required profile

• Proven experience in customer‑back, forward‑deployed or embedded product work, with shipped outcomes and measurable impact.
• Strong senior‑level judgement to distinguish stated requests from underlying problems and build trust with customers.
• Leadership through influence, guiding cross‑functional teams without formal authority.
• Commercial judgement to translate customer reality into product direction and prioritise effectively.
• Technical fluency to work with engineering and data‑science teams and build AI‑driven prototypes.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity, creating structure and making decisions with incomplete information.
• Excellent communication tailored to customers, technical stakeholders and senior leadership.

Required skills

• AI‑driven solution prototyping
• Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG)
• Evaluation frameworks (evals)
• AI agents
• Tool integration for AI workflows
• MCP (modern AI production patterns)