Sr Principal Product Manager, Customer Zero
Workday· enterprise· HR/Payroll Software· Sep 22, 2026 · 1mo ago
USA, CA, Pleasanton
In office
Full-time
Principal
$232K–$348K
12+ years exp
Job description
Your work days are brighter here.
We’re obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we’re shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you’ll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We’re in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you re building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you’ll do meaningful work with Workmates who’ve got your back. In return, we’ll give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop and the support of a company invested in you for the long haul. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you’ve found a match in Workday, and we hope to be a match for you too.
About the Team
The Customer Zero team sits at the intersection of Product & Technology (P&T), Workday on Workday (WoW), and Workday's business functions (Finance, Legal, People & Purpose). WoW runs Workday's own instance and has dedicated Product Managers who each own a specific product area — Core HCM, Finance, PATT & Benefits, and more — driving the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the systems Workmates use every day. P&T's Agent Factory and product teams build the underlying platform and agents (Sana, Self-Service Agent, Evisort, and others). The business functions are the real end users whose day-to-day pain points and workflows are the richest source of product truth available anywhere. Customer Zero exists to connect all three groups so that what we learn from running Workday on Workday directly and rapidly shapes what we ship to customers.
About the Role
The Sr Principal Product Manager, Customer Zero is the connective layer that keeps this three-way partnership moving. While WoW s product managers each own their own product s roadmap, this role does not own a single product area — it operates across all of them, functioning day-to-day as a program lead even though the title sits at the Product Manager level.
Role Responsibilities:
Serve as the primary point of coordination between WoW s product managers, P&T s engineering and product teams (including Agent Factory), and business function leaders — ensuring each side has visibility into the others priorities, blockers, and timelines.
Own the Customer Zero operating cadence — monthly executive updates, scorecards, and cross-functional workshops — that sits above and pulls together the individual roadmaps each WoW product manager separately owns.
Consolidate feedback surfaced by WoW s product managers and business users into structured, prioritized requests for P&T, making sure the right owning teams are looped in rather than working the same issue in parallel.
Lead/support major internal pilots and company-wide rollouts (e.g., new Sana releases), coordinating timing, eligibility, and change communications across WoW, P&T, and the business — without owning the underlying product.
Own change enablement and adoption for Customer Zero initiatives: build and drive enablement playbooks, run trainings and onboarding sessions, produce FAQs and pop-up communications at launch, and ensure Workmates actually adopt what s shipped — not just that it ships.
Act as a catalyst for change within our own team, pushing WoW/BT itself to adopt Customer Zero practices and mindsets — holding the team accountable to its own commitments (e.g., program updates, feedback triage), championing new tools and workflows internally before asking others to adopt them, and modeling the customer zero behavior we expect from the rest of the company.
Design and run multi-day cross-functional workshops bringing together P&T, WoW, and business stakeholders to stress-test product strategy, producing briefing documents that route findings and actions to the right owning team.
Represent Customer Zero in executive and customer-facing settings — town halls, CEO/CAB briefings — telling a unified story about the value of the partnership rather than any single product line.
Lead cross-functional technology evaluations (e.g., vendor PoCs), synthesizing input from WoW, P&T, security, and legal into a joint recommendation.
Communicate transparently across all three groups when product or service issues surface through internal usage, treating them as part of the shared Customer Zero learning loop
About You
Basic Qualifications:
12 years of experience supporting SaaS and/or cloud-based enterprise software products at scale.
12 years experience in product management, envisioning, defining, and delivering impactful enterprise products.
12 years of experience delivery change agency, product orchestration and product transformation.
Other Qualifications:
Experience in product or program management, ideally with exposure to both technical/engineering teams and business functions (HR, Finance, or Legal).
A track record of working across multiple product-owning teams without duplicating or overriding their ownership — building trust with peers who might otherwise see you as stepping on their turf.
Direct experience leading change enablement and adoption efforts — playbooks, training, launch communications, and adoption measurement — not just strategy and planning.
Strong facilitation and executive communication skills, with comfort designing and running multi-day cross-functional workshops and presenting to senior leadership.
The ability to translate messy, real-world feedback from internal users into structured, prioritized input that engineering and product teams can act on.
A bias toward transparency — willing to surface hard problems (bugs, delays, resourcing gaps) early and communicate them clearly across teams, including your own.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field. Master s degree highly preferred.
Workday Pay Transparency Statement
The annualized base salary ranges for the primary location and any additional locations are listed below. Workday pay ranges vary based on work location. As a part of the total compensation package, this role may be eligible for the Workday Bonus Plan or a role-specific commission/bonus, as well as annual refresh stock grants. Recruiters can share more detail during the hiring process. Each candidate’s compensation offer will be based on multiple factors including, but not limited to, geography, experience, skills, job duties, and business need, among other things. For more information regarding Workday’s comprehensive benefits, please click here .
Primary Location: USA.CA.Pleasanton
Primary Location Base Pay Range: $232,000 USD - $348,000 USD
Additional US Location(s) Base Pay Range: $197,600 USD - $348,000 USD
Our Approach to Flexible Work
With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in-office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you ll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote home office roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.
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