Product Manager - Emergent

Product Manager, Emergent Work

Location:

Austin, TX

At Bus Patrol, 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.

Bus Patrol is expanding its 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.

• 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, market sizing, unit economics, competitive landscape, and recommendations enabling executive go/no‑go decisions.
• Leverage and continuously improve a repeatable intake and qualification framework for the Emergent Work team to drive visibility to key stakeholders.

• Be the front door for opportunities flowing in from key stakeholders, sales, Gov Ops, 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 to drive speed to decision while reducing cognitive load on stakeholders.

• Construct commercial opportunity, technical analysis, market sizing, competitive landscape, unit economics, build‑vs‑buy analysis, and a clear recommendation.
• Present objective evidence and state assumptions; use Fermi‑style estimation when data is lacking.
• Produce tight executive memos.

• Conduct stakeholder interviews, customer conversations, and technical feasibility scoping with engineering and data.
• Synthesize findings into a structured opportunity brief.
• Move fast, focusing on outcomes; sprints should deliver a clear recommendation, not an open‑ended backlog.

• Prepare materials, ask tough questions, and present findings to an executive audience.
• Defend recommendations, including those to kill initiatives and preserve capacity.
• Limit attention to critical ideas that deliver the biggest impact.
• Document passed opportunities: learnings, decisions, and what could change the answer.

• Stay with qualified opportunities through early validation, partner outreach, pilot scoping, and paid‑pilot conversations.
• Manage development capacity through prioritization and balancing responsibilities.
• Hand off viable opportunities to a product or enablement team when they’re ready to scale.

• 3–5 years in product management, strategy, consulting, corporate development, or a comparable discovery and analytical role.
• Ability to build a business case from scratch, including market sizing, financial qualification, and a defensible recommendation presented to a senior audience.
• Strong written communication; can turn a messy problem into a one‑page memo for executives.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward structured and systems thinking.
• Ability to push through opinions to illuminate data and insights.
• Stewardship of company capacity and capital, not an advocate for every idea.
• Strong data and analytical skills—impact sizing, Fermi‑style estimation, proxy metrics, measurement.
• Rapid reading, adjusting, and communicating with executive audiences.
• Early adopter of AI tools (Glean, Claude, ChatGPT, or similar) for research, analysis, drafting, or prototyping.
• Bias for action, leading from front or back, and willingness to ask tough questions.

• MBA or Master’s degree in a closely related discipline.
• 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…