Senior Manager, Community Programs

Job Description

Zendesk’s Digital CX team is on a mission to enable Zendesk customers and prospects through relevant, high-quality digital engagement, built from the deep well of knowledge our community members have. Our community programs support this effort by nurturing connections and relationships across our user base, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing, open dialogue, and mutual growth. We are seeking an action-oriented and innovative Senior Manager to manage key strategic programs and day-to-day operations for the Zendesk Community team. This agile and talented team of Community specialists and engagement managers are responsible for online forums, user groups, and community-based customer advocacy initiatives. This role will help the team achieve our goals to drive retention, growth, advocacy, and value realization across our user base. 

The most important skill for this role is the ability to understand our community members and their needs. The second most important skill is cross-functional collaboration; this role will work directly with stakeholders in Product,Marketing, and CX, as well as with external partners/customers, to ensure crucial community insights are at the forefront of business decisions. 

What you'll do

• Establish and operationalize a Super User program, in order to:

  • Recognize various levels of engagement and activation from our community members

  • Identify, recruit, enable, and nurture Super Users

  • Gain insights that deepen community influence on our business 

• Build and manage the Community team roadmap, ensuring the team’s community motions are aligned with overall business goals, priorities, and KPIs across Digital CX and the wider enterprise:

  • Share regular quarterly business reviews and readouts with key stakeholders

• Provide managerial oversight for all community programing, including, but not limited to: 

  • Content and event strategy

  • Product feedback and community ideation

  • User groups and meetups

  • Overall community customer experience and engagement across the community lifecycle

• Manage a team of Community specialists, developing and improving competency models, capacity/resource management, portfolio management, and prioritization

• Partner with teams such as Marketing, Social, Product, and CX others to amplify & promote community programs

• Continuously improve and innovate our community methodology, with consideration for the impacts of AI technologies on this discipline

• Measure and track overall impact of community programs, analyzing community metrics and KPIs to measure engagement and effectiveness

• Keep up with industry trends and bring insights into our strategic initiatives to ensure that Zendesk is delivering innovative, gold-star community experience
   

What you bring to the role

You are a great match for the team if:

• You are an experienced Community leader who is eager to develop others in this career path 

• You are a passionate advocate for our customers and enjoy the unique challenge of digital innovation

• You bring a customer-first mindset, curiously seeking ways to improve our community 

• You have experience developing and managing agile operations, programs, and initiatives
   

The ideal candidate will meet the following qualifications: 

• 5+ years experience in a strategic Community role, ideally in a B2B SaaS environment

• 3+ years managing people; experience with remote and/or distributed team leadership is a plus

• Fluency in written and spoken English

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; experience communicating across audiences and personas, from executive leaders to daily end users

• Proven ability to build program/function roadmaps, create rigor in delivery, and measure success

• Thrives in a global, cross-functional, collaborative work environment

• Self-directed, highly motivated, and 

• Enjoys receiving feedback from customers; is able to synthesize, identify trends, and develop actionable plans to serve their needs

• Ability to handle multiple projects