From Customer POV to Platform Data - Scaling User Context at Zendesk
Group Product Manager (acting)·Zendesk – Icarus → Platform (Sunshine, Custom Objects, Customer Context)·2020-2021
EnterprisePlatform / InfraProduct Strategy
"It was amazing to partner with you to drive the initial product MVP. You played an important role pushing to clear technical debt and establish key UX! We all appreciate the way you show up for the team and are always so enthusiastic, energetic, and passionate in sharing the team's progress. Your storytelling and presentation skills are something the design and product team have learned a lot from. Thank you for being such an amazing PM to work with."
The impact
240-customer beta. 55 enterprise accounts ($20M ARR) migrated with low friction. Feature velocity doubled after a 9-month tech debt refactor. 18 engineers managed across 3 teams.
Custom Objects v2 shipped from scratch to GA, giving Zendesk customers the power to model real business relationships - assets, warranties, subscriptions - without writing code. The Agent Workspace migration program improved performance 6-29% across 75 enterprise accounts with a 99.7% smoke test pass rate.
The call most PMs avoid
Custom Objects v1 was API-only. That meant only developer-heavy customers could use it, and the beta had limited adoption. Enterprise accounts needed flexible data modeling, but the platform could not support it. The Custom Fields codebase underneath was brittle enough that building anything new on top would create compounding problems.
So I made the move that looks like inaction and is actually leverage: stop shipping new features for 9 months and refactor the foundation first. Pausing visible feature work is the decision a PM optimizing for optics never makes, because it costs you nine months of things to demo. The Custom Fields tech debt was the real constraint, gating everything downstream. After clearing it, new features shipped in less than half the time. That one sequencing choice, unglamorous and unpopular in the moment, unlocked the entire Custom Objects v2 roadmap. The nine months were not a delay. They were the investment that made everything after them cheap.
With the foundation solid, I led the GA build from scratch - separately from the existing beta. I designed an Admin schema builder so non-technical admins could create and manage custom data structures without engineering help.
We shipped 6 object templates, bulk CRUD, relationship permissions, and integration with Zendesk's Logic and Automation systems so custom objects could trigger the same workflows as native ticket data.
To get the data model right, I ran 12+ participant interviews across car rental, supply chain, event management, healthcare, insurance, IT, and e-commerce. I analyzed beta schemas from early adopters to find the most common object relationships (assets, cases, warranties) and benchmarked against Salesforce, Freshdesk, Hubspot, Intercom, Kustomer, and ServiceNow. The guiding design principle came from a strategy session with VP Product Shawna Wolverton: "I should not make my data model my customer's problem."
I operated at acting group PM scope, coordinating across ~18 engineers, managers, and designers on three teams (Triggers & Logic, Sunshine UX/Icarus, and Custom Fields) through a period where three consecutive managers went on leave.
What this built
- A platform data model that scales with the customer's business. Custom Objects extended Zendesk's native schema so enterprise customers could track real-world relationships, not just tickets and users.
- An Admin UX that removed the code barrier. Schema builder, object explorer, and unified fields management made structured data accessible to non-technical admins for the first time.
- A proof point for sequencing discipline. The 9-month refactor became an internal reference for how clearing tech debt unlocks feature velocity - the kind of decision that compounds.
What people said about this work
EricaDirector of Product Management, Zendesk“I think you're great. I'm excited to see you really executing. Transferring product ownership to your gang was awesome - lets you demonstrate everything I knew you could do when I hired you. You present well and are well liked, and it's known you bring huge value which is so awesome.”
Jian WeiDirector, Platform Design, Zendesk“It was amazing to partner with you to drive the initial product MVP. You played an important role pushing to clear technical debt and establish key UX! We all appreciate the way you show up for the team and are always so enthusiastic, energetic, and passionate in sharing the team's progress. Your storytelling and presentation skills are something the design and product team have learned a lot from. Thank you for being such an amazing PM to work with.”
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