Product Management Predictions for 2025
What will happen in the world of Product Management? Let me check the 🔮 crystal ball. These are the trends I see....
A few weeks ago I was asked what I believe would be the big themes in Product Management in 2025.
I can’t answer that question without reflecting on the last 12 months.
The Year That Was
In 2024, I saw a shift in what the market is looking for in Product Managers.
Rather than focussing on product delivery, there is a growing push to create value. Improving the commercial acumen and financial literacy of product managers and product leaders was what I found. The sessions that I was running on P&L for Product Managers were receiving a lot of interest globally, so my biggest problem was navigating timezones.
I saw a lot of re-titling of roles from Project management to Product management and a need to upskill in the role. It’s what Marty Cagan warned will need to happen in “Transformed: Moving to the Product Model”. I’m glad to see this happening. People have been reaching out to me for product training and ongoing coaching to strengthen their product teams capability. I love sharing my knowledge and teaching through the ICAgile Certified Product Management course I wrote and have met many great people who will create amazing products.
Another question I kept getting asked, particularly from founders or product managers of new products, was how can I grow my product. Here is where I shared with them the basics of sustainable (and profitable growth) which involve two steps. First, understanding customers better than they understand themselves - personally, I can’t go past the Wheel of Progress and Jobs to Be Done approach here. Supercharge this discovery with AI and you have a powerful predictive engine that can fuel any product growth. Second, design a product (messaging, positioning, pricing, experience, every touch point) around being the answer to the struggling moment your customers have - through the customer journey. Then constantly monitor, measure and optimise for growth (give them a reason to join, stay, pay, refer).
I also saw a growth in the Chief Product & Technology Officer role. Merging the capability of Product and Technology which is a kind of unicorn as Product Management is a domain that has been born out of Marketing (the business, commercial and customers side), while the most senior technology person should come from a deep technical background. I see this trend continuing and am keen to see how this works in practice. If you’re a CPTO, please come on Product Circle Chat and share your experience. Send me an email at irene@phronesisadvisory.com
And of course there is AI. We can’t ignore the elephant in the room. Not that I’m surprised. AI has been part of my career for as long as I can remember. From working on Speech AI to building reporting using Predictive Analytics to currently using it as a sparring partner and occasionally reprimanding it for making things up and not showing it’s work. (ChatGPT and I have had words about the inventions that it wrongly attributes to male made up names, rather than the women that invented them). Training my own AI chat bots has made experimentation faster. It’s taken me a couple of hours to go from idea to a working prototype that can be tested with real users. This means we can experiment faster, validate ideas to solve real problems faster. This is what’s exciting. If you want to know about these, send me a message at irene@phronesisadvisory.com
So what do I see for 2025?
2025 Predictions: Focus on Value and Impact with a little AI help
I see Product Management evolving. We’re no longer the T-shaped generalists with a depth of knowledge in one field. We are broken combs with multiple fields of deep knowledge. The world is changing and being able to learn fast is the real strength.
In 2025, I see people in product management learning and getting better at their craft in order to
Create value for customers so they join, stay, pay, refer and grow your product.
That means understanding customer’s struggling moments and designing experiences across the customer journey that solve their problem so they switch, are willing to pay, stay and tell everyone about how great your product is.
Create viable products for your business that are profitable.
That means understanding the financials, costs, revenue, profit. It also means embedding growth into your product experience and creating products customers want to pay, stay and refer.
Innovate and Influence.
Let’s not build better mousetraps and copy competitors. This means being able to see the future, create it, inspire and influence those within your organisation (and partners) to help make this vision a reality and lead the market. Crucially, how you innovate depends on the operating system your organisation follows. So product people will need to continue to operate slightly differently depending on the company culture. There are no cookie cutters to innovating, influencing and creating value.
With the world, technology, customer expectations and the investment landscape continuing to change quickly, 2025 will be about zoning in on delivering value, impact, and outcomes.
Here’s what I can see on the horizon for product management next year:
1. Generative AI Assistant
Generative AI (GenAI) is set to revolutionise product management. Beyond the hype, its applications will become helpful for product teams.
We used to complain that we were bogged down in meetings and not able to do real product work. That we’d stay at the office late into the evening to do the real product work after those meetings were done. Well the real product work is those relationships, human connections, meeting decisions, understanding customers, influencing stakeholders, and getting things done.
Sure, have your AI help you with messaging and positioning your emails, messages and other copy. Product managers have already figured this out.
But outsourcing the drafting of user stories to your AI assistant (which you then check), asking it to analyse customer data at scale, spar with it on all the potential moves and counter moves you could take with your product strategy and how they may play out in the market.
GenAI accelerates workflows and uncovers insights that might otherwise remain hidden.
Product managers will lean on GenAI to:
Predict market trends by analysing vast datasets in real time.
Generate prototypes rapidly, reducing time-to-market.
Automate repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategy and innovation.
But they won’t make you a better Product Manager - if you don’t already know what you’re doing. It’s not an alternative to having deep Product Management experience or having had the opportunity to learn from a Product Expert on how to create great products - whether through taking a course or regular product coaching.
We learn through experts. In context.
So if you’re a product manager with at least 10 years experience in delivering profitable, valuable and successful products, an AI Assistant can only super power your impact.
If you’re not there yet, enrol in a Product course, hire a Product coach or come along to Product Circle Chat.
We need to be explicit and clear in our prompts, in the design of custom AI Assistants, about what good looks like. Remember, it is only as good as it has been designed to do. And we know AI already reflects the biases of our world.
Checking the responses, thinking through the implications, balancing the benefits and the costs, is what we should all be doing as Product Managers.
Want to learn more about how? Come along to 💡 Product Circle ⭕ Chat - GenAI in Product Management with Greg Prickril
The importance of understanding how to work with AI as a product manager is going to make you irreplaceable.
Even Andrew Ng, cofounder of Coursera and Deep Learning AI Agrees:
2. No Excuses: Focus on Value
Historically, product management has been mistakenly equated with delivery. In 2025, this narrow view will be replaced by a focus on value creation and commercial impact.
It’s time to get intentional.
Less delivering products and seeing what sticks. Time to prune the overgrown features and zero in on creating and maintaining products that create value for the business (which they can only do if they first solve a problem for an end user).
Product managers will become more commercial and expected to measure and communicate how their work impacts the product’s profit and loss statement. Boards and executives care about numbers:
What’s driving revenue?
How are costs managed?
What pricing strategies work best?
Understanding the financials, what drives revenue, how the product is monetised, what are the fixed and variable costs, how to negotiate these costs, whether the product is priced correctly or if money is left on the table. This commercial acumen will be part of the Product Manager’s remit. Know your numbers. Know how to tell the story of the product and how it impacts the numbers. Your CEO will thank you for this.
When I started consulting in 2020, I was told that product managers did not see the income statement, they didn’t have access to the product and loss statement. This was a huge red flag for me - learning that outside the world of large corporations, product people in smaller organisations did not see these numbers and yet were responsible for creating successful products. That’s when I started teaching about pricing strategy, how to create a business case model, how to read the product P&L and tell the story of how the product initiatives created value.
I’d tell product people to make friends with their commercial counterparts, learn how the product P&L gets constructed monthly, what levers are available to you, and how the numbers get attributed.
This means:
Understanding financials, including costs, pricing, and revenue drivers.
Aligning product strategies with the product P&L.
Tying product OKRs to metrics that matter, like revenue growth, profit targets, customer acquisition and retention targets.
Rich Mironov explained this so well at 💡Product Circle ⭕ Chat - How Product Management adds Value + Politics or Influencing at the C-Suite
Want to learn how to do this yourself?
Come along to the Product Commercials Masterclass - P&L for Product Managers class
3. Innovation and Product Growth
Sustainable growth isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a necessity. While performance marketing can kick start your product growth, having customers that love your product and can’t help but buzz about it is the ultimate in sustainable product growth.
What’s that?
Lower customer acquisition cost? Yes!
Customers who are so invested in the product that they want to help you improve it and grow it? Absolutely!
With heightened competition and savvy consumers, product teams must double down on knowing their customers.
In 2025, the mantra will be: Design around growth. That means:
Know your customer’s struggling moments. The Wheel of Progress canvas is perfect for this
Build frictionless user experiences that encourage users to switch, pay, stay and bring others.
Design around repeatability and seamless growth that fit into users lives effortlessly.
Leveraging customer insights to innovate in ways that drive real growth.
Practically, this means staying closer to your customers than copying competitors. This also means seeing what they do in real time in your product, not just what they say.
Product led growth starts with understanding the user, the struggling moment, the big hire and the many little hires throughout the product experience.
Don’t let paper cuts happen.
I feel that creating a culture of innovation will take longer. Innovation requires empowered and diverse teams that speak up, share ideas and feel safe to fail. That means it can only happen in an environment of psychological safety.
While organisations will want their product teams to be more innovative, this will take longer as cultural transformations to create psychologically safe environments where people feel empowered are never an overnight thing.
4. Measure Outcomes
Gone are the days when vanity metrics like downloads or feature counts sufficed. Product teams in 2025 will need to focus on outcomes over outputs. Success will be measured by:
Customer Acquisition rate
Average Revenue Per User
Profitability
Retention and engagement rate
Repeatability - referrals
Understanding how your product grows and being able to affect that growth will be key. Knowing your profit margins. Understanding your run rate. Knowing how to measure impact and show the outcome of your product activities will be crucial.
What gets measured matters and ultimately the C-suite execs look at the Financial Statement, so start there.
Engagement metrics are important when it affects this bottom line. If you need your use to engage daily to increase likelihood of retention, work on designing your product with prompts for them to come back to your product daily, but remember to provide them value. No nudges for attention sake.
If your product is more of a set and forget, think insurance, then engagement won’t be a metric you’ll be designing for.
Understanding why your users switch, stay, pay, refer are metrics for growth. Understand how these work, monitor these and optimise for the behaviour you want.
This shift reflects the broader evolution of product management—from delivering features to strategic leaders driving impact.
"“The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce." Melissa Perri, author of Escaping the Build Trap.
2025 is set to redefine what it means to be a product manager. At the heart of this change is the realisation that product management is a strategic business function that is more than delivery. It’s about creating value, product growth, innovation and impact that align with business goals.
To save time and focus on the real product work of influencing and innovating, product managers need assistance through the use of Gen AI Assistants. Keep learning as the real strategic differentiator crucial for your employment is this ability to learn faster than others around you. Get across the financials, understand the business case, build a relationship with your sales, marketing, commercial finance, legal and other departments. Keep the customer central but know that your role is one of creating value for the business while solving problems for customers.
The world is turning faster, stay curious!
Product Management was never one for the faint hearted.
What are your predictions for Product Management in 2025?
Are you new to Product Management and want to learn from me?
I created a Course. For people new to Product Management.
Aligned it with the Learning Outcomes created by Product greats like Jeff Patton and others. Had it certified by the globally recognised ICAgile.
Choose to spend 2 days learning from me - either face to face or via Zoom - with ICAgile Certified Professional in Product Management (ICP-PDM).
And if you’re looking for a sneaky discount, send me an email at irene@phronesisadvisory.com