Forward Deployed Product Manager

Forward Deployed Product Manager

Location: U.S. (Remote, but must be based in the United States) Travel: Depending on the assigned engagement, substantial travel to state government partner sites may be expected Clearance: Must be eligible and able to pass a government background check

ABOUT SPRUCE

Spruce builds privacy-preserving, standards-based digital identity and credentialing solutions that give individuals control of their information while enabling governments and enterprises to deliver secure, interoperable services. We partner with private and public-sector organizations to modernize how identity is issued, verified, and used.

THE ROLE

We are seeking a Forward Deployed Product Manager to sit alongside our government customers during discovery, architecture, and design - sometimes while engineering is building - and help them work out what they actually need, and why.

You will support specific deployments, beginning with the California Career Passport Program - a statewide education and workforce credential initiative. Much of this work is customer-driven today and requires hands-on engagement with individual implementations, even as we work toward consolidating these efforts into reusable Spruce products. Holding both of those at once is the job. Beyond product discovery, you also own ecosystem adoption - getting issuers to issue, verifiers to verify, and learners to adopt - with startup-style resourcefulness and measurable KPIs.

The surface area is broad. One week you may be shaping the roadmap for a statewide digital identity wallet, the next a citizen-facing portal, the next the APIs and microservices underneath. You are responsible for the end-to-end product picture and for understanding how those pieces fit together.

This is not a roadmap-and-quarterly-planning role. We move quickly, put work in front of small pilot groups, and let evidence change the plan. At the same time, this is identity infrastructure, where security, accessibility, and reliability genuinely matter. Knowing what can be iterated on quickly and what absolutely cannot is central to doing this job well. In some cases, you may source and build that pilot group yourself.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

1. CUSTOMER-EMBEDDED DISCOVERY

• 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

2. END-TO-END PRODUCT OWNERSHIP

• 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

3. HANDS-ON USER RESEARCH

• 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

There is no research team sitting behind this role. You do this work yourself.

4. INFLUENCE IN A PUBLIC SECTOR CONTEXT

• 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

5. PATTERN RECOGNITION AND PRODUCT STRATEGY

• 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

6. JUDGMENT ABOUT PACE VERSUS RISK

• 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

7. ECOSYSTEM BUILDING & ADOPTION

• 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

WHAT YOU BRING

• 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
• Ideally, meaningful experience in education, workforce development, or adjacent sectors
• 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. and excited to engage directly with state government partners
• Passion for workforce development and expanding opportunity through technology

NICE TO HAVE

• 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

WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS

• Shape identity systems that millions of residents will actually use
• Work directly with senior government stakeholders on mission-critical infrastructure
• Operate at the intersection of policy, engineering, research, and real-world delivery
• Help turn individual state deployments into durable product capability
• Help build the education and workforce credential ecosystem that connects Californians to opportunity
• Join a small, high-trust team where autonomy and judgment matter

At SpruceID, we value diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or veteran status.