At a large company, responsibility tends to arrive by calendar. First comes the narrow roadmap, then the cross-functional project, then—after enough planning cycles—the important customer. Pallet has compressed that sequence until it looks almost inverted. New Agent PMs learn by taking possession of something that matters: a national carrier, a freight-forwarding workflow, an enterprise rollout, or a gap in pre-sales. The job gets real before it gets comfortable.
Across four conversations, the first meaningful carve-out arrived between the first week and six months. For most, it arrived inside the first month. This was not a ceremonial seat in a customer call. It meant being accountable for the result: understanding how operators work, deciding how an AI agent should behave, earning agreement from customer executives, and getting the deployment into production.
Pallet’s product model makes that possible. Agent PMs do not support a fixed SaaS box from a safe distance. They can configure the logic and functionality an agent delivers. When a customer describes a manual load-building process, the PM helps define the better future state and how the product will make it real. The warehouse floor becomes part research lab, part product review, and part proving ground.
Week one: here are the keys
Josh had spent nearly nine years at Accenture, then studied supply chain at MIT and built custom agents for inventory optimization and sourcing. He expected Pallet to resemble professional services with stronger technology. By the end of his first week, the company handed him a large account with ambitious growth objectives.
Not measured in months, not measured in weeks. Measured in days.
Josh, Agent PM
The account was a national less-than-truckload carrier. His team built an initial engine in roughly a week. A leader at the carrier told him they were shocked by how quickly it reached that level of accuracy. The speed is striking, but the more revealing detail is where Josh’s responsibility began and ended. In consulting, he estimates a comparable relationship might have taken four to six years to earn—and his work would probably have ended with a recommendation.
At Pallet, the recommendation and the implementation live in the same loop. Josh is not, as he puts it, “tweaking the colors of buttons.” He is helping decide the behavior of a product inside a customer’s operation. The authority is useful because the accountability is equally concrete.
Own the outcome, then rewrite the process
Diane arrived from venture-backed startups, including companies in transportation payments and workforce management. Ambiguity was familiar. Even so, her first weeks expanded quickly: she was onboarding customers in Colombia and rewriting pieces of the deployment process within two weeks. Engineering picked up some of those changes, and parts reached the product soon after. By roughly month six, she owned a major enterprise customer.
At Knight-Swift in South Carolina, her team ran a one-month proof of concept focused on customer support and track-and-trace work. The resulting Auto Send system answers track-and-trace emails without human review. Reports containing hundreds of lookups once consumed half a day—or an entire day—for an operator. The system handles them in minutes.
The tempting version of this story is that clever software did the work. Diane’s version is more human and more laborious. At the beginning of an engagement, she may schedule dozens of meetings in one week so individual operators can show how their jobs actually function. She calls the method blunt, but it keeps people from becoming abstractions in a process map. Before an agent removes repetitive work, someone has to notice every exception, workaround, and bit of tribal knowledge holding the workflow together.
If you’re worried, then you’re not the right fit. Having more autonomy should make you excited.
Diane, Agent PM
A side quest becomes a market
Ishan’s first assignment in January was the Lineage order-entry project. The configuration sat within his technical range. The surprise was the web of senior stakeholders, competing incentives, and consensus-building around it. Enterprise software does not enter an operation on technical correctness alone.
That lesson became literal on a trip to North Carolina. As the team landed, a colleague told Ishan that he would lead the customer meeting: present to senior executives, field the questions, guide the room. He assembled a deck on short notice and did it. The deal did not close, which is precisely why the episode is useful. Early ownership at Pallet includes the right to carry a consequential attempt, not merely to collect credit after a win.
Ishan discovered he enjoyed the ambiguity of pre-sales as much as building. Rather than wait for a role to appear, he volunteered to fill the gap. Months later, he was alone in a Mumbai boardroom presenting Pallet to the group CIO and regional leadership of a subsidiary of a company with more than $250 billion in annual revenue.
Today his remit includes international expansion: finding partners, recruiting toward a possible office, doing cold outreach, and bringing in new customers. He wants to found a company someday. This is less a simulation than a company nested inside another company: no clean job boundary, no guaranteed outcome, and no one else to make the first move.
At Pallet, your growth is limited only by the problems you’re willing to take ownership of.
Ishan, Agent PM
The cost target on day two
Karthik spent five years as a Microsoft product manager, most recently on an AI-assistant experience across the Office ecosystem. He left partly because the ownership he wanted still looked years away. Pallet gave him a small platform configuration on day one. On day two, the assignment was to cut the cost of an enterprise customer’s agent by 40 percent.
Within about two weeks, he owned that customer’s freight-forwarding account. By roughly six weeks, his remit covered the customer’s accounts across several business units, multiple mid-market accounts, and work on another enterprise engagement. The customer was Lineage, one of Pallet’s publicly named customers.
Then came a message asking how Pallet would launch five expansion projects at once across the Netherlands, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Karthik expected his manager to lead. Instead, the scoping and momentum were his to create.
There was a moment the autonomy felt like too much. What got me past it: this is exactly what I signed up for.
Karthik, Agent PM
His most telling assignment did not begin as an assignment. One week into the job, a personal introduction led to a discovery call with a manager at a large third-party logistics provider. Karthik had one week at Pallet and no prior logistics background, yet he led the conversation as the face of the company. It has since moved toward a formal engagement. At Pallet, a side quest is often an audition for the main quest—and the audition can begin before you know the script.
What to steal from the Agent PM model
Pallet’s model offers a useful design for teams that say they want ownership but keep routing every decision upward. First, give a new hire a real surface area, not a shadow project. A live customer or workflow creates sharper learning than a sandbox because the feedback has consequences. Second, keep access to leadership short. Autonomy is not abandonment; the PM owns the call while experienced operators remain close enough to improve the judgment behind it.
Third, let customer discovery change the product. If the deployment team can only apologize for a fixed roadmap, it cannot own the outcome. Pallet’s Agent PMs can shape logic and functionality in response to operations they observe. Fourth, treat volunteered problems as legitimate role formation. Ishan’s move into pre-sales and international expansion was not career-plan theater. It began with work that needed doing.
There is a cost. A compressed learning curve can feel like overload. Stakeholder management arrives before mastery; travel puts the work in unfamiliar rooms; the customer’s operation does not pause while a new hire gets oriented. This model will not fit someone who wants every boundary drawn in advance. Its appeal is the reciprocal bargain: the company hands over consequential work early, and the PM agrees to become the person who can carry it.
The warehouse is the roadmap
The Agent PM team grew from three people to 10 in six months and was targeting 20 by year-end at the time of the interviews. Pallet is hiring in San Francisco and New York, with in-office work and deployments that can happen on a customer’s floor.
The backgrounds are deliberately mixed: Microsoft product management, Accenture strategy consulting, MIT supply-chain research, venture-backed startups, and data science. The shared qualification is not a logo on a résumé. It is comfort moving between product logic, operator interviews, enterprise politics, and the unglamorous follow-through that converts a promising demo into a working system.
For candidates, the useful question is not whether they want “more ownership.” Almost everyone says yes to the abstract noun. The better question is whether they want the specific Tuesday afternoon version of it: the customer asks how five global projects will launch, the manager does not take the call away, and the next move is yours. At Pallet, that moment may arrive in year one. It may arrive in week one.
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