Interviewing a Forward Deployed Engineer is harder than it looks. The role sits at the intersection of engineering, product thinking, and customer work, which means a standard technical screen will miss most of what matters. Hire the wrong person, and you’ll end up with either a brilliant engineer who can’t communicate or a polished customer-facing…
Founders often describe the same problem using different words. “We need someone technical who can work with customers and help us close and deliver.” On the surface, that sentence sounds like one hire. In practice, it can mean three very different roles, and confusing them is one of the more expensive mistakes you can make…
Something has changed in how the most technical, customer-facing roles are being hired. Founders used to describe the gap vaguely, “someone who can work with customers and also get into the code.” Now there’s a name for it: Forward Deployed Engineer. If you haven’t encountered the title yet, you will soon. And if you’re building…
Our client is a fast-growing B2B workflow automation and document management startup who was on the hunt for their next Product Design Director to scale out the creative processes, strategies, team, and implementation for their next brand reinvention. The Hands-on Hero – $106,000 + 10% Bonus Hands-on Design Director with global B2B SaaS and design agency…
Hiring a first product manager often feels like a logical next step. The product is gaining traction, new opportunities are emerging, and the business needs someone to bring structure to how things are built. In practice, that hire tends to expose something deeper. It reveals how prepared the business actually is to operate like a…
Our client, a PE-backed edtech company with over 100 employees, was hiring for its most senior marketing leadership role, with a mandate centered on performance and growth. The company was approaching $20M ARR and had recently secured meaningful investment to support its next phase of expansion. They were seeking a marketing leader with the mandate…
Hiring a first product manager is rarely just a staffing decision. For most founders, it marks the moment when building a company starts to require a fundamentally different kind of thinking about priorities, trade-offs, and how the product grows. To understand how that transition plays out in practice, we spoke with John Merse, a VP…
AI is not simply reshaping software functionality. It is fundamentally altering how enterprise technology is evaluated, validated, approved, and ultimately purchased. For founders building B2B SaaS companies in 2026, this shift is structural rather than cosmetic. Enterprise sales has moved from persuasion-heavy to validation-heavy. It has shifted from storytelling to technical credibility. And increasingly, it…
When the CEO of Alexi set out to hire their first product manager, the objective was clear: ship the next version of the product on more advanced LLM models and support the company’s growth from Series A to B. What unfolded was broader and ultimately more impactful. Walid Koleila joined Alexi, an AI automation platform…
Our client, a Bay Area AI SaaS startup, had recently raised a Series A and was experiencing a surge in inbound interest. To keep up with demand and drive expansion, they needed an Enterprise Customer Success Manager. Our client was in search of CSMs with a specific profile: experience managing technical users and large Enterprise…
Hiring your first Product Manager is one of the most consequential decisions a founder will make. It is rarely just a headcount decision. It is a signal that the company is shifting from founder-led product decisions to a more structured, repeatable way of building. When done at the right moment and with the right profile,…
Benchmarking Product Marketing Manager salary and compensation is rarely straightforward. Compensation is frequently described as being “all over the place,” and for good reason. Even within the same industry, salary ranges can vary significantly between companies hiring for the same title and level of experience. That’s because Product Marketing Manager (PMM) compensation is shaped by…
After hundreds of conversations with hiring managers and recruiters, one thing has become crystal clear: getting hired as an AI product manager isn’t about certifications, bootcamps, or theoretical knowledge. It’s about something far simpler and far harder to fake, lived experience. The Fundamental Rule That Still Applies Despite all the hype around AI, the…
What do Chief Product Officers earn today? As we enter into 2026, we’re pausing to take a look at the current state of Chief Product Officer salary and compensation packages. These numbers are based on the real salaries of B2B SaaS Chief Product Officers we’ve recruited and represented. Planning to hire a CPO? Visit The…
We’ve been placing product leaders across Europe for years, and as we kick off 2026, we want to start the year by helping companies and candidates better navigate compensation expectations. We’ve analyzed our own first-party data from a recent search; 34 experienced Product Managers we’ve engaged with across Europe. These aren’t survey responses or self-reported…
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