The 2024

State of Product
Management
Report
Data-Backed Insights Into How Product
Professionals Make Smarter Decisions and
Deliver on Product Vision and Strategy
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03
Report Highlights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 04
Product Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 05
Desire for Standardization Drives Tools Consolidation. . . . . . . . . . . . . 09
Artificial Intelligence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Workforce Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Product Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Success Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Organization Success Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Prioritization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Product Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
User Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Report Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Introduction
Welcome to the ninth edition of ProductPlan’s State of Product managers keep teams focused on the right
Product Management Report. things by creating a concise product strategy that can
quickly adapt to changing circumstances and delivering
After almost a decade of publishing this annual report,
products customers want and need despite limited
we have enjoyed witnessing the tremendous growth and
internal resources. Product leaders are forging a new path
evolution of the product management discipline. We’re
for product teams in order to compete and win despite
honored to have the privilege to work directly with many
fluctuating market conditions.
incredible product professionals to understand their goals
and challenges. Changing market conditions are just one of the many
challenges product organizations have faced in recent
Our research showed that product teams are in a
years. Global economic uncertainty, changing consumer
position within organizations across industries like
habits, and artificial intelligence are significant influences
Financial Services, Banking, Retail, Insurance, Healthcare,
that have shaped how product managers function and the
Higher Education, Software/SaaS and many more to
work they produce.
deliver innovative products and services that drive real
progress globally. This year, we asked product professionals to share their
experiences with adapting to uncertainty, how they
2024 is shaping up to be the year of product. Evidence of
imagine the future of their solutions with their product
this includes the increased presence of product leaders in
vision, and how they are delivering on their vision despite
the C Suite. According to the 2023 CPO Insights Report,
budget constraints and smaller teams. We compiled
30% of Fortune 1000 companies have a CPO in 2023,
insightful responses from over 1440 product professionals
up from 15% in 2022. In addition to the increase in CPOs,
worldwide and analyzed them to spot the latest trends.
product managers are increasingly helping organizations
focus on monetization by making sure product teams build We hope you enjoy the report!
the right things.

03
 Report Highlights
01 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.

02 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. Speaking of which…

03 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.

04 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.

05 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.

04
Product Strategy
One key product management responsibility is developing the product strategy
and using that to guide product development. To effectively use your product
strategy to guide your product development efforts, everyone involved in
developing your product needs to know what your product strategy is.

Developing 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 asked our respondents
about the primary driver of their product strategy.

What primarily influences the development of your product strategy?

05
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%)

Contrast that with the 48% who said their primary influence was external.
Customer feedback was the primary driver for 27% and competition/market was an
influence for 21%.

Another interesting point is that those who relied on information from outside
the company also appeared to do a better job of aligning with their company
goals. The overall ranking of effectiveness was 4.03 out of 6. The average
ranking for people primarily influenced by customer feedback requests was
4.25, whereas those who reviewed the competition and market ranked their
effectiveness as 4.29.

Effectiveness of product vision and strategy aligning with company

goals (scale of 1 to 6) compared to drivers of strategy

06
Communicating your product strategy
Your product strategy won’t be an effective tool for aligning your product team if
people don’t understand it. A big factor in how well people understand your product
strategies comes down to how it’s communicated.

We ask our respondents how confident they were that people in their organization
understood the product vision and strategy. Based on a scale of 1 to 6, the average
rating was 3.7 showing there was definitely room for improvement on getting others
to understand the product strategy.

If you assume that a key factor in how well people in your organization understand
your product strategy comes from how it’s communicated, you can look at the
various ways people use to communicate product strategy.

We asked what techniques people used to communicate their product strategy,

leaving the option to select more than one. Here’s what we found:

Techniques used to communicate product strategy

07
When we combined the techniques people use with their confidence that people
understood their product strategy, we had a couple of interesting observations.

First, almost everyone that ranked their confidence as a 4 or greater (29%) used
multiple techniques to communicate their product strategy.

Second, one technique that most of those people with a confidence of 4 or higher
used was a Product Management Platform.

In fact, if you compare each technique with the average effectiveness, Product
Management Platform appears to be correlated with the best understanding of
product strategy.

Confidence that the product vision and strategy are well understood
at your organization compared to communication mechanisms (overall
rating was 3.7) All combinations 4 or above

08
Desire for standardization
drives tools consolidation
Overall, less than half of our respondents said they’re To help build that consistent view without needlessly
experiencing tool consolidation. hampering product teams organizations we more
frequently look to product ops function. We found that
37% of companies have product operations as part of their
Are you currently experiencing or have you product organizations. This capability helps your product
recently experienced tool consolidation? team operate through such behind-the-scenes activities
as facilitating user interviews and market research,
organizing data to aid decision making, and managing the
tools that a product team uses.

That thought is borne out by the response to the question

about what drives the need to consolidate tools. Nearly ¾’s
of respondents indicated an influence for consolidating
However nearly 56% of respondents at large companies tools was the need for standardizing tools across teams/
responded they are going through tool consolidation. This departments and nearly half said lack of visibility and
is most likely because the bigger the company, the greater data silos was another reason.
the challenges driving alignment and communication, and
the need for a consistent view of product management The other biggest influence was financial considerations -

activities and their outcomes. nearly half said that they were consolidating tools because
of budget constraints. Effectively, multiple tools drove
higher licensing fees.

Influences contributed to the need to consolidate tools

09
When we asked what jobs-to-be-done people believed were important for product
management tools to perform, ¾ of respondents (76%) said product strategy and
over half (58%) said roadmapping were important investments for the team to make.

What are the most important investments for your team to make?

We also asked what jobs people expect to be done with the same tool. Putting
those responses aside for the moment, it’s clear that a considerable majority (64%)
of people expect to see product strategy and road mapping in the same tool and
roughly half of those would also expect to see launch management.

Most important investments for your team to make (combination)

10
It makes sense that folks want strategy and roadmapping in the same platform,
as strategy is now the central product management activity. And as we saw
above, product management platforms are one of the most effective means of
communicating the product strategy to stakeholders.

Product management jobs that should be done with the same tool

Product management jobs that should be done with the

same tool (combinations)

11
When we examined control of the budget for product see budget responsibility for product tools belonging to
tools, that responsibility seems to be fairly spread out the executive to whom product reports. When product
with product owning the responsibility in a plurality of reports to other departments or is spread around the
cases (33%). That changes where Product reports to an organization, budget responsibility is more spread out.
executive (apart from the COO). In those cases, nearly half

Who owns the budget for product tools compared to who owns product

12
Artificial Intelligence
In 2023, we all saw AI go from a curiosity to a business There’s a fairly even spread of AI use cases that
essential. It’s no surprise that over 50% of respondents organizations are trying, with Generative AI having the
have identified their first AI use case and 19% are already highest percentage of users.
using it in multiple places.

What artificial intelligence/machine learning use cases are you considering or have implemented?

We can’t tell from this data what problems people are product principles such as Shopify’s ‘We always want the
using AI to solve. It is promising to see that different user to be in control.’”
organizations use different AI use cases, which hopefully is
It's promising to see Financial Services, Insurance and
a sign that they are being intentional about identifying the
Manufacturing industries with a plurality of uses in
problems they want to solve rather than blindly applying AI
process/workflow automation. These industries rely
for the sake of using AI.
heavily on efficient business processes. Another
As Peter Yang pointed out, “To build an AI product that example is the relatively large percentage of retail
users return to, you must focus on user problems that AI businesses using AI for predictive analysis, most likely
is uniquely positioned to solve well. You must define clear to predict future sales.

13
We asked our respondents “What artificial intelligence/machine learning use
cases are you considering or have implemented?” but we didn’t ask them to
differentiate if those use cases are in their product or applying AI in their product
development processes.

Product management platforms that properly apply

AI will allow product managers to focus more on
research validation and strategy.

It’s possible that organizations are using Generative AI and automating

data parsing and categorization to help with their product development
process. Applying AI for these purposes makes it possible for product leaders
to make smarter decisions, faster. And it will allow PMs to focus on more
valuable work outputs.

This is where AI and a Product Management platform are increasingly working

together to make product managers' lives easier. Product management platforms
that properly apply AI will allow product managers to focus more on research
validation and strategy, which is where they want to live.

14
Workforce Setup
We asked our respondents for some insight into where they worked, and the
results show that while most organizations are getting their staff to come back
into the office, it’s only for a few days every week. The hybrid way of working is
definitely predominant.

When we look at different sized organizations, a larger percentage of smaller

organizations are completely remote - most likely because those organizations
started out that way and have been set up to be remote from the beginning.
Interestingly, the percentage of fully in-person companies decreases as the size of
the company increases.

What is your workforce setup?

15
Product
Organization 16%
of organizations
35%
of organizations
with 1 to 4 with 50 to 99
We looked at who Product reported to and compared product people product managers
the results for different sized companies and different have Product have Product
numbers of people in Product. There were a couple of report to a CPO report to a CPO
trends we noted.

A larger proportion of small companies had product

managers reporting directly to the CEO. This was Roughly a quarter of organizations have product
consistent where there are fewer (less than 20) product managers report to a CPO, regardless of size of the
managers. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise. As most company. However, if you split the responses up based
organizations start out, the CEO will typically act as the on the number of people in Product, only 16% of
main product person until the product gets large enough organizations with 1 to 4 product people have Product
that the organization needs to pay more dedicated report to a CPO, whereas 35% of organizations with 50 to
attention to Product. 99 product managers have Product reporting to a CPO.

Who Product reports to based on size

16
An interesting side note is that there is a lower percentage of organizations
with 100+ product managers that report to the CPO (31%) compared to those
organizations with 50 to 99 (35%). Potentially offsetting that difference is an
increase in the number of organizations where product managers are spread
throughout the organization and do not report to a single organization. That jump
in the percentage of organizations with product managers spread throughout the
organization is consistent when you view data based on overall company size.

There is a lower percentage of organizations with

100+ product managers that report to the CPO
compared to those organizations with 50 to 99.

There are a few explanations for the higher percentage of organizations with PM’s
spread throughout the organization. First, larger organizations are more likely
to have multiple product teams sitting in separate business units rather than a
central product development organization.

Second, large organizations and organizations with over 100 product managers
are likely to be enterprises with multiple products or are enterprises adopting a
product operating model and therefore moving several people into product roles.

The move to a product operating model also explains the jump in the percentage
of large organizations (13%) where product managers report to the CIO.

17
Challenges
We asked what people considered the biggest challenge their product
organization faced in 2023. 38% of organizations identified economic uncertainty
as the biggest challenge followed by hiring and retaining talent (22%) and
changing consumer habits (16%)

What is the biggest challenge your product organization faced in 2023?

18
We did not see a significant difference when viewing mentioned challenges were some variation on: resource
the data based on company size or when comparing the limitations; speed and adaptability; product market fit;
responses from individual contributors vs product leaders. internal changes and alignment; and competition and
staying ahead of competitors.
If you’re curious about some of the other challenges
that respondents mentioned, the five most frequently

Challenges by company size and role type

19
Success Measures
Product managers are very aware of the need to measure perspectives, such as investment decisions and even the
success in order to adjust what we’re doing. We usually entire product organization. Here’s a look at what our
talk about success measures around our product, but respondents had to say about measuring success from
organizations often want to measure success from other those three different perspectives.

Product Success Metrics

For measuring the success of your product, your first We take some solace from the results because the
choice should be product metrics - quantifiable and product metrics of product usage, product adoption,
actionable data points that can guide your product and retention rate came in 1 -4 in the rankings.
decisions. Product metrics can include things such as
product usage, product adoption, or retention rate.
Your product team can have a direct impact over these
For measuring the success of your
types of metrics.
product, your first choice should be
In contrast, business metrics such as revenue growth
or average revenue per user are influenced by several
product metrics - quantifiable and
variables. These are lagging metrics because changes actionable data points that can guide
your product decisions.
to your product take some time to show up as an impact
in revenue.

So it was interesting to note that when we asked the

respondents to rank their product success metrics, Output focused metrics such as Backlog Items/Points
revenue growth came in as number 1, and that ranking delivered came further down the list which we take as a
did not differ between individual contributors and good sign that product teams are gauging success more
product leaders. In fact, the rankings between individual on outcomes than the typical measure in feature factories
contributors and product leaders were fairly consistent. of how many features you can pump out.

20
So why does revenue growth come in as the top product success metric even
though it’s a lagging indicator and not fully in the influence of the product team?
As Aakash Gupta notes, it could be because as organizations looked to reduce
costs, they expected product people, especially product leaders, to take on more
general manager responsibilities. A big part of that is focusing on revenues, costs,
and profits besides the expected product metrics.

So while product managers aren’t the CEO of the product, they may start
becoming the general manager of it, at least regarding how they measure success.

What are your team's primary success metrics?

21
Investment Decision Success Metrics
Product success metrics provide guidance on the actions A common measure of investment success is business
you take with your product. If you fly up a few thousand metrics such as revenue, sales, cost, and profit.
feet, there’s a distinct set of metrics that organizations Retention, adoption, usage and growth are also prevalent.
used to gauge whether their decision to invest in a
Given the wide range of measures of investment success,
particular product and product team turned out the way
we next wanted to find out if respondents thought that
they were expecting.
their investment decisions met senior management’s
We asked the respondents to describe how they measured expectations. Here’s their response organized by
the success of their investments. The ten most frequently Individual Contributor, Product Leader and overall.
mentioned ways to measure ROI were:
There doesn’t appear to be a significant difference
01 Revenue between individual contributors and product leaders. In

02 Profit both cases, a little under half thought investment decision

results were meeting expectations.
03 Customer Satisfaction

04 Financial Metrics A larger percentage of individual contributors (35%)

seemed to be unsure whether results met expectations
05 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
compared to product leaders (28%). The difference
06 Cost Savings could be because of the product leaders' more direct
07 Sales interaction with senior leadership, so they may get more
direct feedback on how investments performed in
08 Adoption Metrics
relation to expectations.
09 Market Share

10 User Engagement and Retention

Are investment
decisions meeting senior
management expectations?

22
When asked the primary cause for investments not When we looked at the results based on company size,
meeting expectations, there didn’t seem to be one there were a couple points of interest. Large companies
overriding reason, although the lack of a clear company seemed to have more of a problem with a misallocation
strategy seems to win out over the others. of resources and less problem with lacking clear company
strategy compared to small and medium-sized businesses.
That view seemed consistent whether the respondent was
an individual contributor or product leader.

Reasons investments did not meet expectations by role type and company size

23
Organization Success Metrics
In addition to measuring their actions on specific While there is not a significant difference between
products, and the success of their investment decisions, individual contributors and product leaders, the individual
many leaders want to know how successful their product contributors were slightly more likely to look at how many
organization is. items they knocked off their roadmap or how many people
were using their product compared to product leaders.
Part of the trick here is how you even measure that?
Do you refer to the measures that we’ve already looked And even though most product organization success
at, or are there other ways to see if a product organization metrics are outcome focused, there’s still room to measure
is successful? how successful certain activities are, if for no other reason
than to identify opportunities for improvement.
So we asked. And as before, we wanted to see if individual
contributors had a different perspective about measuring When we asked respondents to identify the activities
the success of product organizations when compared to that were most challenging to track, a significant
product leaders. plurality (41%) identified building out the product
strategy and roadmap. Collecting customer feedback
It appears that outcome related measures, be it business
came in second with 24%. Respondents probably found
measures like revenue or product metrics like retention
these activities more difficult to measure because there
and usage, are the primary measures. We take that as a
are not as clear output measures compared to developing
sign that more organizations look to outcomes rather than
or launching products.
outputs to measure success. We see that as a good sign.

Which activities are the most challenging to track and measure?

24
Prioritization
One of the key actions that product people take that plays a role in the success of
products, investments, and the product organization is prioritization.

With that in mind, we wanted to look at what drives prioritization. We asked

respondents to rank five factors in the order in which they drive prioritization. The
resulting order was: customer needs/wants, company goals, internal requests,
competition, and other.

You can see the full results below. Notice that customer needs/wants and
company goals were fairly close 1 and 2. That shows that organizations consider
solving customer problems and business problems to an equal degree, which is
also a positive sign.

Factors that drive prioritization, ranked

25
We also wanted to look into who ultimately controls prioritization decisions. From
an overall perspective, CPOs were the ultimate decision maker in a roughly same
percentage (40%) as CEO (38%).

When we split the results out by company size, we see there is a considerable
difference in who controls the decision making. In 43% of small companies,
CEOs control prioritization decisions compared to 38% of small companies
see Product owning prioritization decisions. That’s most likely because of small
companies not having formed product departments yet so the CEO inherently
makes those decisions.

From an overall perspective, CPOs were the ultimate

decision maker in a roughly same percentage (40%)
as CEO (38%).

In medium and large companies, more companies percentage-wise see Product

controlling priority decisions and fewer where the CEO controls decision making.

A trend to watch is whether companies that had product controlling prioritization

decisions will follow the lead of Airbnb and walk away from empowered product
teams to more centralized control with the CEO.

26
One way to gauge if that trend occurs is to compare who respondents said
ultimately controls prioritization decisions compared to who product reports to.

Regardless of who Product reports to, the CEO and Product have the highest
percentage of controlling priority decisions. Only with product reporting to the
CEO or CPO did that role have control of priority decisions in a majority of cases.

55% of organizations in which Product reports to the

CPO, Product had control of priority decisions

56% of organizations in which Product reports to the

CEO, the CEO had control of priority decisions

There are a couple conclusions you can draw from these results. First, there is
no one model for determining who controls priority decisions - it is up to each
organization, and probably heavily dependent on the people filling specific roles.

Regardless of who Product reports to, the CEO and

Product have the highest percentage of controlling
priority decisions.

Second, where Product reports to a role other than CPO, but Product decides
priority, that could be a sign that product managers in those organizations control
priority decisions.

27
Product Process
The product community has had a continuing discussion about how product
management and product ownership relate to each other. To some extent,
that’s a discussion about whether product management is about discovery,
delivery or both.

So we wanted to get a sense for where our respondents spent most of their time:
discovery, delivery or equal amounts both.

We found that a plurality (42%) of our respondents spent equal amounts of time
on discovery and delivery. If there was a focus of one activity over the other we
found a larger percentage spent their time mostly on delivery (39%) compared to
mostly on discovery (17%). Those ratios stayed mostly the same when comparing
individual contributors to product leaders.

Where do you spend most of your product management activity?

28
We wanted to see if there were any other characteristics that may drive
differences in product activities, so we organized the results based on company
size. While small and large companies model the overall numbers fairly closely,
it was interesting to see that nearly half of the respondents from medium-sized
companies said they spent an equal amount of time on discovery and delivery.

We also wanted to see if the primary influence on product strategy related to

where product managers spent their time. We determined the percentage of
respondents who spend 50% or more of their time in discovery by combining
respondents who responded equal amounts both or mostly discovery.

We then compared those percentages based on their response to the question of

primary influence on product strategy.

In organizations where senior leadership dictates

product strategy, product people are less likely to
perform discovery activities.

Where respondents said their product strategy was primarily influenced by

competition and market, customer feature requests, or sales and support
feedback, over 60% spend a majority of their time in discovery.

Contrast that with respondents who said that senior leadership was the
primary influence on product strategy, slightly less than half spent most their
time in discovery.

A conclusion to reach from this is in organizations where senior leadership dictates

product strategy, product people are less likely to perform discovery activities.
These are the organizations where you’re most likely to find feature factories and
product managers solely focusing on delivery.

29
User Research
One activity tied closely to discovery is user research. In order to get a clearer idea
of how organizations approached discovery, we asked a couple questions about
user research.

First, we wanted to get a handle on who performed user research. Respondents

could select more than one role, so this was partly an attempt to find out how many
organizations were taking a cross functional approach to user research.

When we look at the results for each role, we see that 73% of our respondents
reported that a product manager was involved in user research. Only 45% of
organizations had a product designer involved in user research and only 23% had
a tech lead involved.

Who is involved in user research?

30
We next wanted to see how many organizations used a product trio, so we looked
at the number of times certain combinations of people were involved in user
research. Our results showed that only 14% of organizations use what’s typically
described as a product trio (PM, Product Designer, Tech Lead) in user research.
That number increases to 16% if you consider a UX researcher filling the role of
product designer.

If we broaden the definition a bit and look for the number of organizations that
have cross functional user research, the percentage goes to 57% of respondents.

Combinations of roles performing user research

31
So while there may be a lot of talk about the product trio, the use of it in practice is
not nearly as wide as you might expect.

We wanted to know what people did with the results from their research. Overall,
more that half of the respondents keep their feedback in a location other than
their backlog with 39% using a separate feedback repository, 21% of respondents
dropped their research results straight into their backlog.

When you compare what people do with their research results compared to their
primary PM activity.

What do you do with user research results in comparison to your

primary PM activity?

Note that the people who spend most of their time in Discovery are more likely to
have a specific repository for feedback, rather than not tracking feedback at all.

Why separate feedback from backlog? It’s highly unlikely that you’re going to act
on every single piece of feedback you receive. Storing feedback separate from
your backlog gives you the opportunity to analyze and consider whether you take
action on feedback. The separation prevents you from trying to do everything and
helps to identify patterns and trends.

32
Report Methodology
We conducted the 2024 Product Management report To provide some context to the results, we asked the
survey in Q4 of 2023. The survey audience includes following demographic questions. Sometimes we
product professionals contacted via social media, product consolidated the responses to provide some common
management communities, and ProductPlan’s email categories. We’ve noted those groups where appropriate.
subscribers. We received over 1440 responses.

What is your job title?

We listed most of the common product job titles in industry and provided an other category. We also identified each title
as representing either an Individual Contributor (IC) or Product Leader (PL). In the Other category we categorized each
response individually.

33
How many employees are at your
current company?
We provided ranges of the number of employees for this question. We also
grouped the responses into Small, Medium, and Large categories based on the
Small Business Administration definition of company size.

34
Where is your company’s headquarters located?
For this question, we provided a list of regions and an Other category.

How many people work in product at your company?

We provided ranges of the number of people who work in product as choices for this question.

35
What industry do you work in?
For this question, we provided a common list of industries and an Other category.

36
Conclusion
We hope you found the 2024 State of Product Management Report as
enlightening to read as we did putting it together. As you can see, there are several
factors working in conjunction to make 2024 the year of product. Product has
moved front and center and has assumed its role as the strategic nerve center of
the business.

There are many complexities to successfully running a product organization.

Internal challenges include product-market fit, managing customer feedback,
communicating the vision and strategy with key stakeholders, and successfully
launching new features and functionality. Challenges from the outside include
economic uncertainty, AI, and changing consumer habits.

In response to these opportunities and challenges, we found that organizations

increasingly rely on outcome-related measures of success. We also found that
product organizations balance customer needs and company goals to influence
their prioritization decisions.

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About ProductPlan
ProductPlan is an end-to-end product management solution that supports
product organizations throughout the product development lifecycle.
Thousands of product organizations worldwide—including Virgin Atlantic,
Microsoft, and Sony—partner with ProductPlan to access new opportunities,
build a winning product strategy, and launch innovative products in one easy-
to-use platform.

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