Data Highlights

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.