Kerim Akgonul

Chief Product Officer Pegasystems

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Kerim Akgonul is Chief Product Officer of Pegasystems, where he is responsible for the design and delivery of the company’s entire product suite. His career is a rarity in enterprise software: he joined Pega as a software engineer in 1992 and has never worked anywhere else, rising over more than three decades to run a product, engineering, and design organisation of over 1,500 people. Pega’s business is the software layer on which large organisations model and execute their own operations, spanning one-to-one customer engagement, customer service, and intelligent automation, all built on the Pega Infinity platform, and Akgonul’s stated preoccupation is that such software should feel seamless and should put capability directly in the hands of business users rather than requiring an engineering intermediary. That emphasis on transparency, on systems that expose how work actually flows rather than hiding it behind configuration, is the throughline of how he talks about the product.

Career Highlights

• Chief Product Officer of Pegasystems since 2021, accountable for the design and delivery of the full product suite built on Pega Infinity.
• Leads more than 1,500 engineers, product managers, designers, and architects.
• Joined Pegasystems as a software engineer in 1992 and has spent his entire professional career at the company.
• Became a corporate officer of Pegasystems at the end of 2013, serving as Senior Vice President of Products before his elevation to Chief Product Officer.
• Oversees product across Pega’s three principal categories: one-to-one customer engagement, customer service, and intelligent automation.
• A consistent public advocate for software that empowers business users directly, with transparency about how systems are built and how work moves through them.

Professional Journey

Akgonul took his undergraduate degree at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and joined Pegasystems in 1992 as a software engineer. Pega at that point was a young company, founded by Alan Trefler in 1983 and still building out the rules-engine approach to business process management that would become its defining technology. Joining at that stage and staying meant growing up alongside the product rather than inheriting it, and it gave him an engineer’s grasp of the platform’s internals that later product leaders hired from outside rarely have.

His rise through the company was gradual and technical before it was executive. He moved from engineering into product leadership, and by the end of 2013 he had become a corporate officer of Pegasystems, a status that placed him among the senior executives whose share transactions are reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission. He held the title of Senior Vice President of Products, running the product organisation through the period in which Pega consolidated its offerings into the unified Pega Infinity platform and pushed into cloud delivery.

In 2021 he was appointed Chief Product Officer. The role gives him end-to-end accountability for the design and delivery of everything Pega ships, with an organisation of more than 1,500 engineers, product managers, designers, and architects reporting into it. The scope covers all three of Pega’s market categories: one-to-one customer engagement, where the product makes real-time decisions about what to offer a given customer; customer service, where it orchestrates case handling across channels; and intelligent automation, where it automates the underlying business processes. These are not separate products so much as three faces of the same decisioning and workflow engine, which is precisely why a single product chief with deep platform knowledge is the natural structure for the company.

His tenure has coincided with the industry-wide arrival of generative AI, and Pega’s positioning as a leader in AI-powered business transformation has depended on integrating those capabilities into a platform whose original selling point was the opposite of a black box: explicit, inspectable business rules. That tension, between the opacity of large models and Pega’s commitment to transparency about how decisions are made, is the substantive product problem of his current tenure, and it maps closely onto the design philosophy he has articulated for years. He continues in the role, sitting on a leadership team under founder and chief executive Alan Trefler alongside chief technology officer Don Schuerman.

Education

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Bachelor’s degree, Mathematics and Computer Science