Product Manager - Emergent Work

BusPatrol•Austin, TX

8d•Onsite

About The Position

BusPatrol is expanding its Emergent Work team to find, qualify, and incubate opportunities that will define the company and industry over the next five years. This role will own the top of the funnel, including intake, discovery, opportunity qualification, and early incubation. The position is complex, dynamic, and fast-paced, requiring the evaluation of opportunities from scratch, building rigorous business cases, and presenting recommendations to executives. The role reports to the Vice President of Product and Strategy with a dotted line to the Sr. Product Manager of Emergent Work, and collaborates across Product, Engineering, Data, GovOps, Legal, and Growth.

Requirements

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 present it to a senior audience.
Strong written communication skills to quickly turn a messy problem into a one-page memo.
Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward structured and systems thinking.
Comfortable pushing through opinions to find and illuminate data and insights.
Steward of company capacity and capital, not an advocate for every idea.
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 daily work for research, analysis, drafting, or prototyping.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Run the Intake Pipeline: Act as the front door for opportunities, triage, frame, and qualify them against a structured quantification framework, and maintain an accurate view of opportunities in flight.
Build Initial Business Cases: Develop commercial opportunity, technical analysis, market sizing, competitive landscape, unit economics, build-vs-buy analysis, and a clear recommendation, using objective evidence and Fermi-style estimation where needed.
Lead Discovery Sprints: Conduct stakeholder interviews, customer conversations, and technical feasibility scoping to synthesize findings into a structured opportunity brief, aiming for clear recommendations.
Drive Rapid Decisions: Prepare materials, ask tough questions, and present findings to an executive audience, defending recommendations, including those to discontinue initiatives.
Document opportunities that are passed on, including learnings, decisions, and reasons.
Incubate The Critical Few: Stay with qualified opportunities through early validation, including partner outreach and pilot scoping, manage development capacity, and hand off viable opportunities to scaling teams.