Senior Product Manager - AI Agents (Forethought)

Zendesk•San Francisco, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Zendesk, we believe in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working enables us to purposefully come together in person to connect, collaborate, and learn, while also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to own the AI agent infrastructure that powers the Forethought platform. Our customers deploy many AI Agents — each configured to handle specific user intents across chat, email, voice, and messaging. You will own the platform capabilities that make this possible: the reasoning engine, the configuration and authoring tools, the self-improvement mechanisms, and the multi-channel infrastructure. This is an individual contributor role reporting to the Group Product Manager, working alongside a dedicated engineering team and designer.

Requirements

5+ years in B2B SaaS product management, with direct experience shipping AI/ML-powered products.
Deep understanding of how language models, classification systems, and agentic architectures work — enough to have strong opinions about tradeoffs and push back on engineering when needed.
Track record of defining and tracking quantitative success metrics for AI systems (not just feature delivery milestones).
Strong product design sensibility — you understand that configuration UX is just as important as underlying AI capability.
Demonstrated ability to design for multiple user personas with different needs, technical sophistication, and success criteria.
Excellent communication skills — you can explain a model performance tradeoff to a VP and a customer in the same afternoon.

Nice To Haves

Experience with agentic AI products, workflow automation, or conversational AI platforms.
Experience navigating post-acquisition or large-org integration environments.
Familiarity with enterprise customer support operations and the challenges of deploying AI at scale.

Responsibilities

Drive roadmap development and prioritization for Forethought's core AI agent infrastructure — the reasoning, resolution, and self-improvement capabilities that power every AI agent deployed on the platform — within the strategic context set by the Director of Product.
Drive the authoring and configuration experience that allows customers to build, customize, and deploy AI agents. This is the primary interface between customers and the platform's AI capabilities — it must be powerful for sophisticated users and accessible for new ones.
Define what "quality" means for AI agent interactions — not just model accuracy, but the thoughtfulness, nuance, and polish of the total experience. Hold the bar for shipping product that enterprise customers trust.
Design for multiple personas — end customers seeking help, support agents working alongside AI, operations leaders configuring agents, and executives measuring ROI — ensuring the platform delivers distinct, well-crafted experiences for each.
Lead hypothesis-driven product development: identify customer problems through deep research and direct engagement, articulate clear hypotheses, and validate them — including through AI Proof of Concepts — before committing to full-scale builds.
Conduct ongoing customer research and interviews to deeply understand how enterprises deploy, configure, and measure AI agents, using those insights alongside quantitative data to define the roadmap in the context of organizational initiatives.