Zach Goldman | Portfolio

Experience

A brief overview of my career journey.

My story

I'm passionate about using AI research in building tools for underserved industries- I've built Operator for folks who have limited mobility, Deep Research for Nonprofits, and ChatGPT but ranking for those unable to express preferences with words. I chose product after reading the Design Sprint and loving the idea of quickly falsifying hypotheses.

I've always been driven by curiosity and a desire to solve meaningful problems, which has taken me on an unconventional path—from studying religion in a monastery to performing stand-up comedy, shadowing surgeons, submitting to film festivals, and building tools that help millions of users. Check out some of my favorite anecdotes from this journey.

Beyond tech, I've tried to explore life deeply: finessing my way into the Library of Congress with an email receipt to research PM methods when it was closed, building ML models to predict satisfaction based on college major choice, and coding tools for students and nonprofits.

                    Last fall, I didn't just build AI—I stress-tested how much I could handle while doing it.
                    Led competitive analysis on AI Agents for Microsoft for 6 months (built a competitive analysis agent myself).
Was told to let an Edge feature die: instead, convinced 5 marketing directors to launch a campaign for a feature before it even shipped—then used that momentum to force product leadership to greenlight it that saved the feature and led to a 7x retention gain.
Caught & fixed two separate bugs that would have broken Windows Copilot for millions of users.
Acted essentially as principal applied scientist assigning work items (at some points reviewing PRs) to a team of 5 scientists representing the Edge org alongside GPMs from Windows & Bing in reporting & analyzing core Copilot metrics daily directly to leadership.
Balanced all of this while building TalkMode, living in a spider-infested Airbnb with bronchitis.

This year outside of work I've also:

Organized the world's first AI Agents for Good Hackathon from scratch
Built & launched 5 AI agents focused on real-world applications—from nutrition analysis using LLMs to AI-powered decision-making tools (Nutrition Agent, TierListGPT, board member agent, Hackathon project, and one coming soon)

Professional Experience

I explored politics (Congressional internship), medicine (shadowing a surgeon), law (interning), and consulting before reading The Sprint Book & Algorithms to Live By, and loving the idea of building products people love and falsifying hypotheses. I then ran design sprints at Deloitte, built an ML model for my thesis predicting satisfaction with major choice, and built projects helping students (Wyrrutgers, Rustewed, TheLX, PocketCoach) & nonprofits (Care Somalia, Career Office). At Microsoft AI, I sharpened my experimentation and data-driven decision-making skills while building AI-driven products at scale. Now, I'm building AI agents to bridge the gap between research and real-world impact. After changing my major 6 times as I found aspects I loved, I wrote my thesis on why students choose their majors for people like me just starting off.

Product Manager at Microsoft (Aug 2023 - Present)
Product Management Intern at Microsoft (May 2022 - Aug 2022)
Software Engineer at Develop for Good (Feb 2022 - Jul 2022)
Lead Product Manager at Rutgers Blueprint (Aug 2020 - Oct 2021)
Technology Strategy Intern at Deloitte Digital (Jun 2021 - Aug 2021)
Prefrosh Retreat Leader & User Researcher at Rutgers University (May 2020 - Aug 2020)
Research & Law Intern at Givner Law Group (Jul 2019 - Aug 2019)
Pre-med Shadow at Broward Health Medical Center (May 2019 - Jul 2019)
Congressional Intern for Congressman Josh Gottheimer (Jul 2018 - Aug 2018)