What does the future of product management look like?

Our article explores 8 key trends in product management that you can’t afford to miss!

Let’s get right to it.

TL;DR

• Product-led growth is becoming the go-to growth strategy and PLG tactics can help sales-led companies to improve customer experience.
• To create customer-centric products, PMs will have to draw on multiple data sources, like user behavior analytics.
• AI is becoming pivotal in product management. Product managers will have to learn how to leverage it for data and customer feedback analysis, and to improve decision-making.
• The future of product management leans heavily towards data-driven decision-making, utilizing product analytics to extract actionable insights and conducting experiments like A/B testing.
• Product managers have to navigate increasingly complex ethical considerations related to issues like data privacy or AI bias.
• Agile and Lean methodologies continue to hold sway in SaaS product management. Their influence is potentially going to grow as companies need to adapt to market shifts faster and manage resources efficiently.
• Data democratization initiatives will be essential to facilitate the collaboration of cross-functional teams and empower them to make data-driven decisions.
• Delivering an outstanding product experience, particularly through concise, visually attractive, and personalized onboarding, is becoming increasingly important for product success.
• To explore how Userpilot can help your product managers build products of the future, book the demo!

Product management trends product leaders should follow

There are a number of product management trends that the product leader of the future can’t afford to ignore.

1. Product-led growth is here to stay

Product-led growth is likely to continue reinforcing its position as a go-to-market strategy for SaaS companies.

According to a McKinsey study, 65% of B2B companies promote self-service as the main acquisition channel. And, 27% of customers are happy to make purchases of over $500k through digital self-service and remote human interactions.

That’s also how users prefer to access support. 77% of customers view organizations more positively if they offer self-service options.

So even if your product or sector requires a sales-led approach, incorporating some elements of PLG will help you improve the user experience.

And let’s not forget about potential savings, for example, on customer success and support teams, which is an important factor in times of economic uncertainty.

2. Product managers must place a strong emphasis on customer-centricity

Developing a customer-centric approach to building products is likely to be even more important for the PM of the future. That’s because faced with growing competition, products will need to better address unique user pain points and needs.

As product managers focus on building consumer-centric products, they will have to hinge on numerous sources of data.

Apart from customer interviews and in-app surveys, they will have to rely even more heavily on user behavior analytics to identify customer needs accurately.

3. Artificial intelligence will become integral to product management

Unless you’ve lived under a rock for the last couple of years, you know how AI is revolutionizing every aspect of the tech industry. Product management is no exception.

The 2022 IBM study has found that 21% of product managers are already using AI. 92% of PMs interviewed for the recent Airfocus report believe that AI will have a long-lasting effect on their work.

AI is helping product teams analyze data and customer feedback, identify market and product usage trends, make prioritization and product roadmap decisions, and develop technical specs.

One of the consequences of AI popularity will be SaaS businesses hiring dedicated AI product managers to implement AI solutions both in the products and product management systems.

If you want to learn more about the impact of AI on product management, why not join us for the talk by Malte Scholz at this year’s Product Drive Summit?

4. Data-driven decision-making will take precedence

In the product management of the future (or present, for that matter), there’s no place for decisions based on intuition or guesswork.

To build successful products, a PM needs to use product analytics to extract actionable data-driven insights. This could be through tracking product usage and user behavior inside the products, conducting growth experiments before implementing changes, or applying new strategies.

5. Product strategy will include ethical considerations

Product managers have to deal with an increasing number of ethical considerations when developing the product vision and corresponding product strategy.

These have to do with issues such as user data privacy and data protection, inclusivity and accessibility, AI and machine learning algorithm bias, transparency in marketing and pricing, and the social impact of the products they bring to market.

6. Integration of agile and lean methodologies

Agile and Lean methodologies are nothing new. It’s been over 22 years since the Agile Manifesto was released and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries was published in 2011.

Yet, both methodologies remain incredibly influential in SaaS product management, and it’s not likely to change.

If anything, their influence can increase as companies will have to iterate even faster in response to the shifts in market and customer needs and get by with limited resources. Collecting feedback is one way to improve experiences and tweak your strategies.

7. Data democratization in the product team

According to the 2023 State of Product Management Report, ensuring cross-functional collaboration and alignment is one of the biggest challenges of product management. Communication or data silos were mentioned as the biggest obstacle to scaling up a product team by 25% of study participants.

Considering how important data-driven decision-making is for building successful products, data democratization is going to play an important role.

This will involve selecting the right data integration tools, providing easy access to data, and training teams on how to leverage it to make informed decisions while ensuring its integrity and security.

8. Key focus on a great in-app product experience

PM thought leaders agree that product success is going to depend even more on personalized onboarding and excellent in-app product experience.

Krzysztof Szyszkiewicz, a pricing and strategy expert at Valueships, believes that:

The best SaaS products will offer personalized product just right after onboarding – it means that introduction survey or even your email domain, will help the product to navigate your situation and you will have it pre-set-up 1 minute after registration

Experts, like Bart Jaworski, a Senior PM at Stepstone, seem to agree that the user onboarding of the future is going to be built around shorter and more visually attractive experiences:

“User onboarding is evolving to become more visually appealing and concise, with SaaS products transitioning away from overlay tutorials and aiming for shorter yet effective experiences.”

Curious about other trends in SaaS onboarding? Why not check out Userpilot’s 2023 State of SaaS report?

You can create onboarding experiences by offering personalized walkthroughs, including checklists, modal pop-ups, etc.

How can Userpilot streamline your product management process?

Userpilot is a product adoption platform that offers product managers a range of tools for driving product growth.

With Userpilot, you can;

• Create a personalized onboarding experience for specific user personas
• Drive feature discovery and account expansion with in-app messages (modals, tooltips, slideouts, banners, driven actions, and hotspots)

• Collect and analyze product usage and in-app customer behavior to guide your product decisions. The analytics features include feature and event tracking, funnel and trends analysis, cohort analysis, advanced segmentation, and A/B experimentation

• Collect customer feedback through in-app surveys for in-depth customer insights

Conclusion

The PM role remains critical for product success and this isn’t changing anytime soon.

However, their job descriptions are likely to expand to include such aspects as implementing AI solutions or ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.

To match these requirements, product managers will need a whole lot of new skills and strategies in their toolsets.

If you want to see how Userpilot can help you keep up with the trends in customer expectations and market fluctuations, book the demo!