From Technical Account Management to Agent Strategy: Why I joined Decagon

If you're like me, you know the quiet frustration of roles where you sit close to the customer but the real building belongs to someone else. You understand their stack better than almost anyone, and you can usually see exactly what needs to be built. But you scope it, you write the ticket, and then you wait. If you have spent time as a Technical Account Manager or similar, you know exactly the feeling I mean.

When I joined Decagon as an Agent Strategy Manager (ASM), that gap disappeared. I was not handing off the work anymore. I was the one in the product building the solution and watching it go live for the customer. That shift, from advising on what should happen to making it happen, is why I think this role is built for technical people who are ready for more runway.

The keyword is partnership

The best way I can describe the role is that you get to be two things at once: a strategic advisor and a technical lead. As an advisor, you help customers think through how AI should reshape their support operation, what to automate first, and how to bring their organization along. As a technical lead, you are in the platform building the thing and tuning it against real production traffic.

Most roles ask you to pick one of those identities. Here they reinforce each other. The credibility you build by shipping real improvements is what makes your strategic advice land, and the strategic context you hold is what points your technical work at the things that matter to the business. Customers do not experience you as a vendor contact they file requests with. They experience you as a partner who owns outcomes alongside them.

Building the agent yourself

At Decagon, ASMs build directly in the product. When a customer needs a new workflow, a smarter routing rule, or a more reliable way to handle a high-volume request, I do not write a spec and pass it to engineering. I open the platform and build it: configuring agent behavior, writing the logic that governs how the agent reasons and acts, and enabling the systems that let it resolve things autonomously. When something needs custom handling, there is room to get into the code and make it work rather than waiting for a sprint to open up.

This is open runway. The loop between spotting a problem and resolving it for the customer is measured in hours or days, not release cycles. Watching something you built start resolving real conversations for real people is hard to get anywhere else.

No two days, and no two customers, look the same

This is not a role with a single rhythm. One morning I am tracing why a workflow is escalating more than it should. That afternoon I might be mapping an integration with a customer's engineering lead, then sketching the next quarter of their roadmap with their VP of Support.

The customer base adds to the variety. You might work with a retailer one day and a financial services company the next, each with completely different workflows, data, and definitions of success. No two AI deployments look the same, and there is rarely a ready-made playbook. For someone technical, reverse engineering how a new business operates and then expressing that in an agent is the fun part.

Enabling customers is how you grow

A big part of the job is not just building agents, but teaching customers to build alongside you. The strongest deployments are the ones where the customer becomes increasingly self-sufficient, and getting them there is also where you grow fastest. Explaining how an agent reasons or how to debug a production issue forces you to understand it more deeply than you would if you only had to make it work for yourself. Over time you get sharper on both sides: more technically fluent in how the system works, and a clearer communicator who can translate complex behavior into something a stakeholder can act on. Those are exactly the skills that make someone a senior technical leader down the line.

Depth over breadth, and a team that pushes

This is not a role where you carry fifty accounts and touch each one for fifteen minutes a quarter. Decagon's model is built around long-term partnership, which means fewer customers and far deeper engagement with each. Because you stay with them over time, you take on bigger and more ambitious builds, expanding what their agents can handle quarter after quarter rather than firefighting one-off requests.

The work also has impact you can see directly. The agents you build talk to real end users every day, and your work shows up immediately in resolution rates, customer satisfaction, and the load taken off a support team. And the team you do it with is building the next generation of AI customer experience. We are still early enough to be defining what great looks like, which means the work you do here shapes the role itself.

If this sounds like you

If you are someone who is customer obsessed with a strong technical background, who is tired of scoping work for someone else to build, who wants the runway to ship directly, and who wants to be a real partner to your customers rather than a ticket router, this is the role I wish existed earlier in my own career.

Come build with us. We are growing the Agent Strategy team and would love to hear from you.