The 2024 State of Product Management Annual Report

Our ninth annual report is a data-backed exploration of how product professionals make smarter decisions and deliver on product vision and strategy.

Data Highlights

What’s inside the report?

This year, we asked product professionals to share their experiences with adapting to uncertainty, how they imagine the future of their solutions with their product vision, and how they are delivering on their vision despite budget constraints and smaller teams. We compiled insightful responses from over 1400 product professionals worldwide and analyzed them to spot the latest trends.

Take a look at some of the highlights from the report below.

Report Highlights

Product strategy is a point of emphasis
Product strategy is the most valuable job to be done for product managers. The drivers of your product strategy and the approach you take to communicating it can play a big part in how effective your product strategy efforts are.

Increasing focus on outcomes over output
A majority of product managers show a marked preference for measuring success using outcomes instead of relying on the easier to track output metric. Most of these outcomes are business related so the next step is to focus on customer outcomes.

Alignment with customer feedback is crucial
Product managers are finding that customer feedback is one of the more effective drivers of their product strategy. They also look to customer needs and wants as the primary factor to consider when making priority decisions. Product managers can reinforce their focus on customers by incorporating more customer related outcomes in their measures of success.

Product organizations seek standardization through product ops
As product organizations scale, they are more actively looking for a standard way of tracking product activities and their related outcomes. This is most immediately observable in the trend toward consolidated product management platforms. A factor aiding this move to standardization is the increased adoption of product operations.

AI impacts products and how product managers work
During 2023, AI became a must-have technology for businesses, leading some organizations to adopt AI so they didn’t miss out. In 2024, product managers are taking a sober look at AI and taking a more reasoned approach to adopting it. They’re including AI in their product in a way that solves customer problems. They’re also using AI in conjunction with their product management tools to make their lives easier.

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What primarily influences the development of your product strategy?Of course you don’t develop your product strategy in a vacuum. Besides your company goals, there are going to be other influences. We found a fairly even split between internal influence and external influences. Roughly 46% of respondents said the primary influence of product strategy was direction from Senior Leadership (31%) or sales/support feedback (16%).Influences contributed to the need to consolidate tools:What drives the need to consolidate tools? Nearly 3⁄4’s of respondents indicated an influence for consolidating tools was the need for standardizing tools across teams/ departments and nearly half said lack of visibility and data silos was another reason.What artificial intelligence/machine learning use cases are you considering or have implemented?In 2023, we all saw AI go from a curiosity to a business essential. It’s no surprise that over 50% of respondents have identified their first AI use case and 19% are already using it in multiple places.

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Methodology

The 2024 State of Product Management survey ran through December 2023. It was sent to ProductPlan’s email subscribers and shared via social media and other product management communities. We received more than 1400 responses.

About ProductPlan

ProductPlan is purpose built to support the entire life cycle of your product. Thousands of product managers worldwide—including teams from Virgin Atlantic, Microsoft, and G2—trust ProductPlan to help them visualize and share their strategies across their entire organization. With our intuitive features, product teams can better unlock collaboration at scale, invest in the right opportunities, and optimize their product processes.