Forward Deployed Product Manager

The role

You will work alongside government customers during discovery, architecture, and design to determine their needs. You will own adoption for specific deployments, including statewide identity programs and workforce credentialing initiatives.

What you will do

• Work directly with state government partners through discovery, architecture, and design
• Understand users, policy environments, constraints, and workflows
• Hold the full product picture across user-facing experiences and APIs and services
• Partner with engineering, design, and delivery leads from definition through deployment
• Design and run user research, including talking to stakeholders and end users
• Synthesize research into product decisions and roadmap direction
• Drive adoption of digital credentials by onboarding issuers, verifiers, and institutional partners
• Find high-leverage partnerships to multiply impact
• Own adoption KPIs
• Put work in front of small pilot groups to redirect the roadmap

Required qualifications

• 6–10+ years of product experience at startups or on new product initiatives
• Zero-to-one experience taking a product from nothing to shipped or pursuing new opportunities
• Meaningful experience in education, workforce development, or adjacent sectors
• Experience in government or another highly regulated environment
• Customer-embedded experience such as forward-deployed product, solutions PM, implementation, or founder-led delivery
• Hands-on user research experience
• Technical depth to read a codebase and hold own with engineers on APIs, services, and system design
• Credible at the executive level with agency directors, university chancellors, and institutional partners
• Based in the U.S.

Nice to have

• Background in digital identity, IAM/ICAM, credentialing, or authentication systems
• Experience building or growing multi-sided ecosystems, marketplaces, or platform adoption
• Background in education technology or learning and employment records
• Familiarity with accessibility standards, FedRAMP, or NIST frameworks
• Experience navigating public sector procurement and contracting
• Prior engineering or deeply technical systems experience

Before you apply

• Must be eligible and able to pass a government background check

About the company

Spruce builds privacy-preserving, standards-based digital identity and credentialing systems to help governments and institutions increase access to services while reducing fraud.