Forward Deployed Product Manager

SpruceID builds privacy-preserving digital identity and credentialing solutions for government and enterprise customers. The Forward Deployed Product Manager works directly with government partners to discover needs, guide end-to-end product development and deployment, and drive adoption of digital credentials across the ecosystem.

Responsibilities:

• Work directly with state government partners through discovery, architecture, and design
• Understand their users, policy environment, constraints, and workflows first-hand
• Look past stated requirements to the underlying problem the customer is actually trying to solve
• Act as a trusted product advisor to public sector stakeholders
• Hold the full product picture across a statewide wallet, citizen-facing portals, and the APIs and services beneath them
• Help partners shape their roadmap and priorities, and make sure what gets built solves the real problem
• Partner closely with engineering, design, and delivery leads from definition through deployment
• Personally design and run research: talk to users, stakeholders, and end users directly, conduct discovery, prototype where appropriate
• Synthesize what you learn and translate it into product decisions and roadmap direction
• Bring user evidence into conversations where requirements are often treated as fixed
• Navigate government relationships thoughtfully while introducing evidence that may challenge stated priorities
• Influence direction without damaging the relationship
• Communicate clearly across users, policy, technical constraints, and business priorities
• Identify patterns across customers and ask what individual deployments teach us about broader product opportunities
• Connect customer needs to reusable product capabilities
• Recognize where a problem extends beyond a single agency, and shape product strategy from evidence rather than incoming requests
• Put work in front of small pilot groups early and let findings redirect the roadmap
• Draw clear lines around what cannot be iterated on loosely: security, accessibility, and reliability
• Make and defend those calls with engineering and with customers
• Drive adoption of digital credentials across the ecosystem - onboard issuers, verifiers, and institutional partners with startup GTM resourcefulness
• Find high-leverage partnerships (university research programs, workforce boards, employer networks) that multiply impact beyond your own direct effort
• Own adoption KPIs and find creative, resourceful ways to move them
• Act as a credible product advisor to executive stakeholders including agency directors, university leadership, and ecosystem partners

Requirements:

• 6–10+ years of product experience at startups or building new product initiatives
• Time in an early-stage environment where you personally shipped product and moved quickly
• Zero-to-one experience: you have taken a product from nothing to shipped, or identified and pursued entirely new opportunities
• Experience in government or another highly regulated environment
• Genuine customer-embedded experience - forward-deployed product, solutions PM, implementation, or founder-led delivery all count
• Demonstrated, hands-on user research: you have designed and run discovery yourself and turned it into product decisions
• Enough technical depth to sit comfortably with engineers and hold your own on APIs, services, and system design. You do not need to be an engineer
• Comfort with ambiguity, a broad surface area, and shifting priorities
• Credible at the executive level - comfortable holding a room with agency directors, university chancellors, and institutional partners
• Based in the U.S
• eligible and able to pass a government background check
• Ideally, meaningful experience in education, workforce development, or adjacent sectors
• Passion for workforce development and expanding opportunity through technology
• Background in digital identity, IAM / ICAM, credentialing, or authentication systems
• Familiarity with accessibility standards, FedRAMP, or NIST frameworks
• Experience navigating public sector procurement and contracting environments
• Prior engineering or deeply technical systems experience
• Experience building or growing multi-sided ecosystems, marketplaces, or platform adoption
• Background in education technology, learning and employment records, or workforce development programs