Senior Director, Product Management

Job Description

Join us at Zendesk, where we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're accelerating that ambition by building products rooted in AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences, because behind every interaction lies an opportunity to make a human connection.

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Senior Director of Product Management to lead the strategy, development, and go-to-market execution for Customer Observability product portfolio in the realm of AI Agentic Actionability and extended ecosystem for AI-driven resolutions.

This leader will define the vision, strategy and roadmap to continuously deliver and improve unified customer observability experiences spanning AI Agents, Custom Agents, Workflows, Custom Business Logic, Analytics, Knowledge, Headless experiences, and related technologies. The ideal candidate combines deep product management expertise with hands-on experience building and launching observability products, a strong understanding of emerging AI technologies and protocols, and the ability to translate complex technical capabilities into compelling customer and business outcomes.

The Senior Director will work closely with Engineering, Design, Research, Marketing, Sales, Partnerships, Customer Success, and executive leadership to establish product vision, prioritize investments, deliver differentiated solutions, and drive adoption across internal and external ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for Customer Observability product portfolio in the realm of AI-driven resolutions.
• Lead the development of unified observability solutions across:
  • AI Agents and Agentic workflows
  • Custom Agents
  • Workflows and orchestration
  • Custom Business Logic
  • Analytics and reporting
  • Knowledge systems
  • Headless experiences
  • Integrations, APIs, and external ecosystem interactions
• Establish how customers can monitor, understand, evaluate, debug, govern, and optimize AI-powered experiences throughout their lifecycle.
• Identify opportunities to enable AI Agents to take meaningful, secure, and measurable actions across internal and external systems.
• Drive product discovery through customer research, market analysis, competitive intelligence, data, experimentation, and direct engagement with customers and partners.
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear product requirements, customer value propositions, and differentiated experiences.
• Partner with Engineering and Architecture to design scalable, reliable, secure, and extensible platform capabilities.
• Guide the adoption of evolving AI technologies, protocols, frameworks, and interoperability standards that enable agentic interactions and actionability.
• Build and maintain a comprehensive product roadmap aligned with customer needs, company strategy, technical feasibility, and business impact.
• Lead cross-functional teams through the complete product lifecycle, from strategy and discovery through development, launch, adoption, and continuous improvement.
• Develop product success metrics and operational mechanisms to measure customer value, system performance, quality, reliability, safety, and business outcomes.
• Partner with Marketing, Sales, Enablement, and Customer Success to develop positioning, packaging, pricing, launch plans, and go-to-market strategies.
• Lead major product launches and ensure effective customer adoption, education, and lifecycle engagement.
• Build strong relationships with customers, partners, analysts, and industry communities to represent Zendesk’s product vision and gather market insight.
• Help recruit, coach, and develop a high-performing product management organization.
• Establish strong product management practices, including prioritization, decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and executive communication.
• Advocate for responsible AI, privacy, security, transparency, and governance throughout the product development process.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of overall industry experience, including at least 8 years of product management experience.
• Significant experience leading product strategy and execution for complex, technically sophisticated platforms or enterprise software products.
• Deep, hands-on expertise building and bringing observability products to market, including experience with product discovery, development, commercialization, and go-to-market launch.
• Strong understanding of the Customer Observability ecosystem and end-to-end observability for AI-powered systems, including relevant concepts such as:
  • Agent behavior and workflow traces
  • Quality, accuracy, latency, cost, and reliability monitoring
  • Evaluation and testing
  • Analytics and reporting
  • Debugging and root-cause analysis
  • Governance, safety, and auditability
  • Knowledge and retrieval observability
  • Integration and system-level monitoring
• Experience defining products across multiple layers of a platform, including AI Agents, Custom Agents, workflows, custom business logic, analytics, knowledge, APIs, and headless experiences.
• Strong familiarity with current AI technologies, architectures, and protocols that support AI Agentic Actionability and interactions with internal and external ecosystems.
• Understanding of agentic systems, tool use, orchestration, memory, retrieval, model interactions, and secure execution of actions.
• Familiarity with evolving OpenTelemetry standards, frameworks, instrumentation approaches, and related observability practices.
• Ability to understand and communicate complex technical topics, including distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architectures, data platforms, AI/ML systems, and cloud technologies.
• Demonstrated success developing and executing go-to-market strategies for new products or major platform capabilities.
• Experience managing and influencing through organizational complexity, ambiguity, and rapid technological change.
• Excellent written, verbal, and executive communication skills.
• Proven ability to attract, develop, and lead high-performing product management teams.
• Strong customer orientation, strategic judgment, analytical ability, and operational discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building products for customer service, customer experience, CRM, enterprise workflow, or business automation markets.
• Experience with AI observability, LLM observability, agent evaluation, AI governance, or production monitoring for AI-powered applications.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and related standards, frameworks, semantic conventions, and ecosystem initiatives for AI and distributed-system observability.
• Experience with AI agent protocols, tool and function calling, interoperability frameworks, model context patterns, workflow orchestration, and secure agent-to-system interactions.
• Experience building developer platforms, APIs, SDKs, event streams, headless products, or extensible ecosystems.
• Experience with data platforms, analytics products, telemetry pipelines, distributed tracing, metrics, logs, evaluations, and real-time monitoring.
• Experience launching products that serve both technical and business users.
• Background working with enterprise customers and complex, multi-system environments.
• Experience partnering with standards bodies, open-source communities, technology partners, or developer ecosystems.
• Experience with responsible AI practices, including security, privacy, compliance, explainability, human oversight, and risk management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field; advanced degree preferred but not required.

Location

This role is based primarily in Zendesk’s San Francisco office. The position may require regular in-person collaboration with cross-functional teams, customers, and executive stakeholders. Additional work-location details will be discussed during the interview process and will be consistent with Zendesk’s applicable workplace policies.

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $283,000.00-$425,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to [email protected] with your specific accommodation request.