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Spruce Systems 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.
You will serve as a Forward Deployed Product Manager, embedded alongside government customers during discovery, architecture, and design phases. This role begins with a statewide education and workforce credential initiative and requires hands-on engagement with individual implementations while working toward consolidating efforts into reusable Spruce products.
Key responsibilities include:
**Customer-Embedded Discovery**: Work directly with state government partners through discovery, architecture, and design. Understand their users, policy environment, constraints, and workflows firsthand. Look past stated requirements to identify the underlying problems customers are actually trying to solve. Act as a trusted product advisor to public sector stakeholders.
**End-to-End Product Ownership**: Hold the full product picture across statewide wallets, citizen-facing portals, and underlying APIs and services. Help partners shape roadmap and priorities. Partner closely with engineering, design, and delivery leads from definition through deployment.
**Hands-On User Research**: Personally design and run research—talk to users, stakeholders, and end users directly; conduct discovery; prototype where appropriate. Synthesize findings and translate them into product decisions and roadmap direction. Bring user evidence into conversations where requirements are often treated as fixed. There is no research team behind this role.
**Public Sector Influence**: Navigate government relationships thoughtfully while introducing evidence that may challenge stated priorities. Influence direction without damaging relationships. Communicate clearly across users, policy, technical constraints, and business priorities.
**Pattern Recognition & Product Strategy**: Identify patterns across customers and ask what individual deployments teach about broader product opportunities. Connect customer needs to reusable product capabilities. Recognize where problems extend beyond a single agency and shape product strategy from evidence.
**Judgment on Pace vs. Risk**: Put work in front of small pilot groups early and let findings redirect the roadmap. Draw clear lines around what cannot be iterated loosely: security, accessibility, and reliability. Make and defend those calls with engineering and customers.
**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 that multiply impact. Own adoption KPIs and find creative ways to move them. Act as a credible product advisor to executive stakeholders including agency directors, university leadership, and ecosystem partners.
This is not a roadmap-and-quarterly-planning role. You move quickly, put work in front of 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 quickly and what absolutely cannot is central to the job.
Substantial travel to state government partner sites may be expected depending on the assigned engagement. You must be eligible and able to pass a government background check.
**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: 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: 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 (do not need to be an engineer)
- Comfort with ambiguity, 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
