Product Manager, Emergent Work Location: Austin, TX
The Opportunity: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.
Key Outcomes: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.
ResponsibilitiesRun the Intake Pipeline- 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.
Build Initial Business Cases- 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.
Lead Discovery Sprints- 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.
Drive Rapid Decisions- 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.
Incubate The Critical Few- 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.
What You Bring:- 3-5 years in product management, strategy, consulting, corporate development, or a comparable discovery and analytical role.
- Demonstrated ability to build a business case from scratch including market sizing, financial qualification, and a defensible recommendation and then present it to a senior audience.
- Strong written communication: you can quickly turn a messy problem into a one-page memo an executive can act on.
- Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward structured and systems thinking. You create clarity from ambiguity.
- Comfortable pushing through opinions to find and illuminate the data and the insights.
- You are a steward of company capacity and capital, not an advocate for every idea that crosses your inbox.
- Strong data and analytical skills-impact sizing, Fermi-style estimation, proxy metrics, and measurement.
- Strong ability to rapidly read, adjust, and effectively communicate with executive audiences
- Early adopter with strong experience in AI tools (Glean, Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) in your daily work for activities like research, analysis, drafting, or prototyping-this team ships POCs and MVPs, not just decks.
- A bias for action, the experience to lead from the front, lead from the back, and the wisdom to know when to ask the tough question.
Preferred:- 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.
Competitive Package: Enjoy a competitive salary, incentives, and benefits in a rapid-growth company.
Travel: up to 20%.
No direct management, but direct influence and dotted-line reporting from SMEs. 
