The State of Product Management Annual Report
Data Highlights
What You Need to Know
For seven years, ProductPlan has asked product managers to tell us about their work. They’ve described, often candidly and in detail, their product planning processes. They’ve discussed their biggest challenges, shed light on how they create and communicate their product strategy, and even opened up about topics like salary, job satisfaction, and their hopes for the future.
This year, we asked over 2,000 product managers from around the world to tell us how the job has evolved beyond roadmapping. We know product managers are doing more than just product management. They’re enabling their teams with product education. They’re influencing how their products are communicated and sold. Product managers are even helping their organizations bring their products to market and acquire new customers.
Yes, product management has changed. This report is designed to capture and share insights into how. We hope the data found in this report can help create a better understanding of not only the work product managers do on a daily basis, but also the growing impact they make within their organizations.
Key Findings
Product managers struggle to prioritize their projects.
Product managers are doing more than ever before. They create the product strategy. They build and manage the organization’s roadmap. They train their teams on new products and features. It’s no surprise that the #1 challenge product managers experience is planning and prioritizing initiatives.
Product managers desire a more self-serve approach to product management.
Product managers spend too much of their time answering questions in 1-on-1 scenarios, or repeating the same information to different stakeholders. 35% of product managers would prefer to refer their stakeholders to the roadmap.
Autonomous product teams are healthier product teams.
Product teams that cite having a high degree of autonomy are also more likely to feel strongly aligned with their teammates, are less reactive than their non-autonomous counterparts, and experienced greater stakeholder engagement with their roadmaps.
The job of a product manager doesn’t end at the roadmap.
Product managers are heavily involved in the launching of new products and features. Product managers say they are the primary owners of training customer-facing teams on new products and features. Over 80% of product managers exert either “some” or “a lot” of influence over product messaging and marketing.
Product ops is essential in connecting the product team with the rest of the organization.
About one third of companies surveyed have a product ops person or team. Product teams with a dedicated product ops team feel more aligned with their organizations, experience greater autonomy in their decision-making, and better trust their peers to read the roadmaps they provide for them.
The product experience has the biggest impact on acquiring new customers.
The growth of the product-led movement has positioned product at the center of everything a business does. More impactful than sales conversations or marketing campaigns, 40% of respondents said the product experience was the biggest driver of acquiring new customers.
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Product managers have been tasked with the impossible: they must influence their organization without much explicit authority to do so. Achieving the impossible requires building alignment through consistent communication with stakeholders.
How do you most commonly share product information with internal stakeholders?When it comes to how product managers most commonly share product information with their peers, 62% say they host meetings and present information live. Answering questions in 1-on-1 conversations came in as a distant second at 14%.
How frequently do internal stakeholders read your roadmaps?For product teams to effectively guide their organization, they need to not only communicate information regularly, but also trust that the information they provide will be consumed. We asked product managers how frequently their internal stakeholders read their roadmaps and found that a significant majority (64%) respond with either sometimes or rarely.
Do you feel like your product team is autonomous?It’s important that product teams have autonomy. Does autonomy increase or decrease as companies grow? The difference is small, but the trend is clear. Product teams at smaller companies on average feel they have greater autonomy than those at larger companies.
Who decides when a new product or feature is announced or launched?We know product managers decide what to build next and work across departments to develop it. But what happens after the product is built? What role does product management play in bringing their products to market? Just about half of product managers (50%) report that the product team decides when a product or feature is announced or launched. The second most popular answer was executive leadership at 31%.
How much influence do you have over product messaging?When it comes to how the product is messaged, product teams continue to exert their influence. We asked product managers how much influence they have over product messaging, to which an overwhelming majority said either some or a lot (83%).
What is your product ops person/team responsible for?Similar to ops roles in the fields of sales and marketing, product ops is a discipline laser-focused on increasing efficiencies, harnessing analytics for better decision making, and improving communication between product and the rest of the organization.The two most common product ops responsibilities are “improving communication between the product team and stakeholders” and “increasing the efficiency of the product team.”
Product teams with a dedicated product ops team feel more aligned with their organizations, experience greater autonomy in their decision-making, and better trust their peers to read the roadmaps they provide for them.
Which of these has the biggest impact on customer acquistion?A lot goes into acquiring a new customer. Sales conversations. Marketing campaigns. Free trials and the in-app experience. We asked product managers what they felt made the biggest impact on customer acquisition. The product experience was the most popular response (40%), with sales conversations a close second at 32%.
What’s your biggest product management challenge?Every year, we check in with product managers and see what their biggest challenges are. This year, while getting consensus still was a top 3 challenge, planning and prioritizing initiatives took the top spot for the first time in three years.
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Methodology
The 2022 State of Product Management survey ran through the month of October 2021. It was sent out to ProductPlan’s newsletter subscribers and shared via email and other product management communities. We received more than 2,000 responses.
About ProductPlan
ProductPlan makes it easy for teams of all sizes to build beautiful roadmaps. Thousands of product managers worldwide–including teams from Nike, Microsoft, and Spotify–trust ProductPlan to help them visualize and share their strategies across their entire organization. With our intuitive features, product managers spend less time building roadmaps and more time shipping products.