Product Manager - Conversational Automation

Description

Caring is one of United’s most important principles. And no one exemplifies that more than our Customer Contact Center team, who helps our customers with everything from booking and managing reservations, to questions about their travel, MileagePlus accounts, and so much more! Are you a people person? Do you get fulfillment from helping others? Then join a team that cares for our customers and makes a positive impact on their travel experience, every single day.

Job Overview and Responsibilities

The Product Manager for conversational customer automation owns the execution delivery and optimization roadmap for the customer facing automated touchpoints (voice, chat, messaging). They are responsible for the day-to-day designing and building the customer automation and will be the connective tissue between operational needs and technical engineering teams. They will translate customer friction points into specific requirements, manage the product backlog, and continuously optimize and improve automated resolution, eliminate customer effort, and ensure an empathetic flawless transition to live agents when needed.

Our approach to automation will address real operational challenges -- for example, sharp spikes in customer contacts during large-scale irregular operations that can lead to extremely long wait times for customers and significant additional hours for our frontline teams –- while enabling our frontline experts to focus on the complex, high-value moments where their judgment, empathy and problem solving skills make the greatest difference.

• Product backlog management and sprint execution
• Own end-to-end agile lifecycle and translate roadmap into user stories and functional specifications
• Partner daily with engineers, conversations designers, and QA to lead backlog grooming, prioritization, sprint planning, and all other agile ceremonies
• Discovery, journey mapping, and intent optimization
• Conduct continuous discovery by analyzing real customer conversation transcripts and speech data
• Map complex, multi-turn customer journeys to uncover friction and drop-off points
• Constantly refine system’s natural language understand model and expanding and tuning intent recognition. 
• Data-driven optimization and KPI analysis
• Monitor and report on daily product health and performance metrics
• Deeply analyze automated resolution/containment rates, abandonment patterns, completion rates, and post-automation CSAT socres
• Conversational prompting to drive incremental improvements
• Contextual escalation and live-agent integration between automated channels and live agent desktop
• Ensure when a conversation requires human intervention, the product transfers the payload (including full transcripts, customer metadata, and intent history) to reduce customer and agent effort
• Operational intake and stakeholder collaboration
• Primary interface for operational leaders, technical teams, QA teams, and compliance stakeholers
• Manages incoming demand pipeline for new automation use cases, vet requests for feasibility and business benefit, and keep stakeholders aligned on product release timelines

Qualifications

What’s needed to succeed (Minimum Qualifications):

 

• Bachelor's degree or related experience
• Management Information Systems, Cognitive Science, Informatics, Business Analytics, Digital Communications or a related analytical/human-computer interaction field
• Demonstrated proficiency in at least one major CCaaS
• Credentials proving the ability to manage a digital roadmap or product
• 4+ years in digital software product management experience
• 2+ years hands-on conversational AI, chatbots, intelligent IVR, virtual assistants or customer-facing messaging
• 1+ year in a leadership role
• Deep experience writing highly detailed user stories, acceptance criteria, and managing backlogs
• Solid grasp of conversational UX logic (fallback behaviors, slot-filling, and structure clear, concise customer prompting)
• Ability to sit with engineers and map out how data will be read and written via transactions to a backend database
• High proficiency using data analytics and visualization tools to isolate root causes of drop-offs or failures in automated paths
• Familiarity with Generative AI concepts and prompt writing
• Exposure to AI platforms such as Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and NotebookLM
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States for any employer without sponsorship
• Successful completion of interview required to meet job qualification
• Reliable, punctual attendance is an essential function of the position
   

 

What will help you propel from the pack (Preferred Qualifications):

 

 

• Master's degree or related experience
• Master of Science in Product Management, Business Analytics, or Information Technology Management or equivalent advanced field
• Background working directly within or along side a fast-paced contact center operational eco-system and managing a vendor platform
• Hands-on experience using Jira
• 5+ years in customer-facing digital software product management experience
• 3+ years hands-on conversational AI, chatbots, intelligent IVR, virtual assistants or customer-facing messaging
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), using internal knowledge management databases and setting constraints to avoid AI hallucinations
• Ability to balance strict operational resolution goals with human-centered metrics, advocating for the customer’s emotional state during critical service journeys
• Hands-on experience using AI tools in projects, internships, or work environment
• Knowledge of automation platforms such as Power Automate, Copilot Studio, Zapier, or n8n