Principal Product Manager (Public Sector) - Brightline

Why This Role

Your initial focus will be BrightLife Kids, Brightline's partnership with California's Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), where you'll own product strategy for new programs and initiatives that strengthen and grow the partnership. From there, you'll expand into owning additional public sector partnerships as this business grows — building the systems, product capabilities, and go-to-market motion that let Brightline both deepen existing government partnerships and win new ones.

We're looking for someone who thrives navigating complex, technical and non-technical stakeholder ecosystems as much as they do defining a product roadmap. The public sector isn't a standard user-to-software environment — it involves political entities, government agencies, school and community partners, caregivers, and intricate cost-share and funding structures. The ideal candidate is a strategic generalist: comfortable operating zero-to-one in an ambiguous, still-forming market, deeply integrated with go-to-market and product marketing work, and able to independently lead complex initiatives from discovery through delivery. This role will regularly mean wearing multiple hats in service of a single goal — growing Brightline's public sector business like a startup within the company.

Responsibilities

• Own product strategy and execution for BrightLife Kids, Brightline's partnership with California's DHCS, and expand into leading additional public sector partnerships as the business grows

• Develop, prioritize, and communicate a public sector product strategy and roadmap — organized around durable opportunity profiles such as renewal defense, scalability enablers, market share expansion, and net-new deal execution — to stakeholders at all levels of the organization

• Partner closely with Clinical, Growth, Marketing, Finance, and Operations teams to translate state and community-level business challenges into scalable product solutions

• Deliver on specific state and agency commitments (e.g., program requirements, notification and reporting obligations, language access) that are critical to the continued success and growth of the partnership

• Build the foundational product and platform capabilities that let Brightline launch and scale new state and grant-funded programs more efficiently

• Operate comfortably in a client-facing capacity, supporting sales conversations, partnership discussions, and program presentations directly with prospective and existing state, agency, or community partners

• Define, measure, and improve the metrics that matter most for the initiatives you own — renewal probability, district/school adoption, program utilization, operational throughput, or other key outcomes

• Independently lead large, ambiguous, multi-stakeholder initiatives from discovery through delivery in a market where the mandate is often 'figure out what to build before building it'

• Mentor other Product Managers and help elevate the product discipline as the public sector team grows

Requirements

• 6+ years of Product Management experience, including significant experience building healthcare technology products

• Experience operating in complex, multi-stakeholder environments involving institutional, governmental, or public-sector-adjacent buyers (e.g., school districts, state agencies, government health programs) — comfortable navigating political, institutional, and cost-share dynamics that go beyond a standard user-to-software relationship

• Demonstrated ability to operate zero-to-one: driving discovery, synthesizing market and stakeholder needs, and building a strategic roadmap from scratch in the absence of an established one

• Direct experience partnering with go-to-market, marketing, or sales teams to draft and test pitches, positioning, and value propositions — not just handing off requirements to engineering

• Comfortable operating in a product marketing and client-facing capacity — supporting sales or business development conversations and engaging directly with institutional or government partners

• Strong analytical capability, including experience using SQL, product analytics tools, experimentation, and data to inform product strategy and measure business impact

• Proven ability to independently lead large, cross-functional initiatives from strategy through execution, and comfort wearing multiple hats in a fast-moving, still-scaling business

• Experience in a high-growth startup or scale-up environment

Nice to Have

• Experience in behavioral health or hybrid digital/physical healthcare

• Experience with government, education-sector, or grant-funded program contracts (e.g., Medicaid/state health agency programs, school-based mental health initiatives)