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,