The 2023 State of Product Management Annual Report

Data Highlights

What’s inside the report?

This year, we asked product teams to guide us through the entire life cycle of their products. From the initial discovery of an idea to the launch of a new product, this report is designed to capture insights into how product teams support each stage of development. It takes survey responses from over 1500 product managers worldwide and analyzes them to spot the latest trends.

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

Key Findings

Standardized and consistent processes are key to Enterprise product team success
Over 50 percent of large product teams (50 people or more) cite “keeping roadmaps and processes consistent” as the number one growing pain.

Product investments are most often sourced directly from customer feedback
“Reviewing customer feature requests” is the number one source of actionable product ideas, according to product managers.

Product strategy is more often reactive than proactive
Approximately 52 percent of product managers say their product strategy is primarily influenced by requests from senior executives or direct customer feedback.

The feature factory persists as a major challenge for product organizations
54 percent of roadmaps are designed around outputs. Only 44 percent communicate outcomes.

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As your product team scales, what is your biggest growing pain?Unsurprisingly, maintaining consistency across roadmaps and processes is more of a challenge for large product teams with over 50 people. Over 50 percent of these teams cite this as the most significant growing pain. In contrast, smaller teams tend to be more concerned with building a coherent team structure and hiring, also in line with expectations. On average, which source provides the most actionable ideas for your product?We found that product teams with a higher degree of autonomy were more likely to feel aligned with their stakeholders and see higher engagement levels while also less likely to shift priorities destructively. What is the primary cause for product development investments not meeting the expectations of senior management?According to our survey, the most popular reason is the lack of a clear company strategy, followed by poorly prioritized ideas, products, or features. What is the primary objective of your roadmaps?When asked what the primary objective of their roadmap is, product managers evenly distribute their answers across a range of popular options. “Plan and prioritize” is the most popular answer this year, but by a very slim margin. The fact that the answers to this question are so evenly distributed likely tells us that product roadmaps are frequently used for all these purposes and probably more.

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Methodology

The 2023 State of Product Management survey ran through October 2022. It was sent to ProductPlan’s email subscribers and shared via social media and other product management communities. We received more than 1,500 responses.

About ProductPlan

ProductPlan makes it easy for teams of all sizes to build beautiful roadmaps. 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 managers spend less time building roadmaps and more time shipping products.