Product Manager - Emergent Work

If you’re a product thinker who thrives on exploring new opportunities, scoping, analyzing, and characterizing new strategic partnerships, customers, and markets, next then this is your role. BusPatrol is expanding our Emergent Work team to find, qualify, and incubate the bets that will define our company and industry over the next five years.

You will own the top of that funnel: intake, discovery, opportunity qualification, and early incubation. This space is complex, dynamic, and fast paced, where you will be evaluating opportunities from scratch, building rigorous business cases, and presenting to executives—including a well-reasoned recommendation based on well-defined criteria. Reporting to the Vice President of Product and Strategy and dotted line to the Sr. Product Manager of Emergent Work, you’ll work across Product, Engineering, Data, GovOps, Legal, and Growth to turn raw opportunities into qualified bets—or close them cleanly.

This role is critical to shaping BusPatrol’s next product frontier extending, our AI-at-the-edge platform into adjacent markets and new capability areas. High-level goals include:

• Rapidly evaluate top of the funnel opportunities such as third party integrations, new partners, new states, strategic partners, and law changes.

• Deliver rigorous due diligence and initial business cases including commercial opportunity, technical requirements and issues, market sizing, unit economics, competitive landscape, deadlines, and recommendations to enable executive discussions and confident go/no-go decisions.

• Leverage and continuously improve a repeatable intake and qualification framework for the Emergent Work team driving visibility to key stakeholders.

• Be the front door for opportunities flowing in from key stakeholder groups, sales, GovOps, partners, and leadership.

• Triage, frame, and qualify each opportunity against a structured quantification framework.

• Maintain an accurate, current view of every opportunity in flight and what it needs next.

• Diligently follow up on opportunities to drive speed to decision while reducing the cognitive load on stakeholders.

• Commercial opportunity, technical analysis and issues, market sizing, competitive landscape, unit economics, build-vs-buy analysis, and a clear recommendation.

• Bring clear objective evidence whenever possible and clearly state assumptions. Impacts should be evaluated rigorously; using Fermi-style estimation where precise data isn’t available.

• Produce tight executive memos.

• Independently or in tandem with Research and Design, conduct stakeholder interviews, customer conversations, and technical feasibility scoping with engineering and data.

• Synthesize findings into a structured opportunity brief.

• Move fast in the spirit of outcome over perfection. Discovery sprints should produce a clear recommendation, not an open-ended research backlog.

• Prepare materials, ask the tough questions, and present pithy findings to an executive audience.

• Defend your recommendations, especially recommendations to kill initiatives and preserve the capacity of our teams.

• Remember we don’t want to spread attention across lots of good ideas; we want the critical few ideas that deliver the biggest impact.

• Document opportunities we pass on: what we learned, what decision we made, why, and what would change the answer.

• Stay with qualified opportunities through early validation which might include partner outreach, pilot scoping, and paid-pilot conversations.

• Manage development capacity through effective prioritization and balancing of responsibilities.

• Hand off viable opportunities to a product or enablement team when they’re ready to scale.

• MBA or Master’s degree in a closely related discipline (advanced analytics, strategy, finance, product, technology management, applied economics).

• Experience in R&D, corporate development, venture, or new-product incubation environments.

• Background in transportation technology, mobility, edge AI, or hardware + software platforms.

• Familiarity with Business to Government, municipal or public-sector customers and procurement dynamics.

• Experience with financial modeling and formal business case methodologies.

• A genuine point of view on where AI changes the economics of a small R&D team.

BusPatrol’s school bus safety programs are violator-funded, meaning that those who break the law pay for the technology that protects children. We build solid partnerships in the communities in which we operate which, coupled with our innovative business model, leads to sustainable efforts to change driver behaviors.

We are looking for a valued member of the BusPatrol team to assist us in our quest to improve children’s safety. This is an important role for us and a great opportunity for the right candidate. Our environment is inclusive, diverse, ignited, built on integrity, and deeply committed.

The US salary range for this position is provided in this posting. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your Talent Partner can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location and skill level during the hiring process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, and/or commission (if applicable) or benefits.