Product Manager - Emergent Work

Product Manager, Emergent Work

Location: Austin, TX

At BusPatrol , we're on a mission to make school transportation safer for children and communities. As a leader in AI-powered safety solutions, we bring cutting-edge technology-AI, machine learning, and IoT-to school buses across North America. We're the most trusted stop-arm safety program globally, delivering transparency and safety at scale. In short, this is purpose-driven work that measurably changes behavior in the communities we serve.

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.

Responsibilities

Run 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.

Why Join Our Team?

• If you are a builder of new teams, capability, and solutions-this is right up your alley!

• Smaller company = more impact, faster.

• Private equity backed.

• Purpose-driven work that protects kids and communities.

• Innovative work in an AI company.

• A distinctive culture that helps you become the next best version of you while "doing well by doing good."

• 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.

How We Work:

At BusPatrol, we uphold four core pillars:

• Safety: We prioritize safety in every decision we make.

• Connection: We foster strong relationships and opportunities for growth.

• Excellence: We strive for quality and innovation in all that we do.

• Impact: We measure success by fulfilling our mission and delivering results.

What We Offer

BusPatrol employees get:

• A competitive salary and benefits package

• Comprehensive personal time off, including volunteering and birthday days off

• An opportunity to help build a company dedicated to children's safety

• The chance to join an innovative and dedicated team, focused on leading-edge technology

• The ability to contribute to purpose-driven work that makes a difference in the lives of real people every day.

Additional Details

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.