Senior Director, Product Management

Zendesk•San Francisco, CA

18h•Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.
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.

Nice To Haves

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.

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.