The State of B2B Product Management 2026

Create a company mission, vision and stick to it. Craft product vision around it. And then drive strategy and roadmap from it.

Clearer business strategy. It is generally assumed that the product strategy will align with the business strategy, but when that is unclear or not in place it can fall on product to drive strategy, while managing stakeholders internally.

More emphasis on vision and strategy to create better products for the market versus only execution on what is directly in front of them.

Focusing on delivering outcomes of the product strategy rather than the whatever client request will immediately drive revenue.

Ability to take risk, innovate and experiment. Better processes to help turn insights into options, into solutions for testing.

Setting clear product goals and measuring the team's progress towards them.

Define a vision for products first. Vision usually comes from the top. Without a vision, there was no North Star for the products. We were just winging it for the next few quarters.

Having the founders actually phrase a vision, that is not "making more money" or would deserve that name.

Don't get desperate when growth is slow, but stick to our plan. We review quarterly, so can adjust course if necessary, but sometimes a big shiny, but wrong opportunity, derails things.

I have set vision and objectives for my product team but these exist in a vacuum of the wider business' intent.

Coherent succinct vision would enable a long term scoping of objectives and products.

Keep the language we use consistent; resist the urge to change messaging every quarter despite the overall narrative not changing.

Be more disciplined about objectives in the executive team, not a different set of objectives every few months.

Write down and socialize the vision and objectives and how we want to achieve it.

I'd like leadership to be clearer on the company's objectives and communicate them effectively and frequently.

Stick to them. The objectives change too frequently to drive anything beyond the short term.

Have quarterly planning to review product alignments with company objectives and not change priorities day by day.

More direct relationships and shorter feedback loops between product and GTM objectives.

Establish ownership of who is responsible for the creation, maintenance and communication of the roadmap.

Stop making everything a priority and derailing the plans for the quarter every week.

Better understanding that we should be selling our product based on what it can do today, not based on the future. Sales committing to feature X to get a sale with Company Y is not a strategy.

Setting a roadmap based on clear business strategy and objectives, being proactive instead of reactive and focusing on outcomes instead of output.

More of a Now/Next/Later with a blend of key results and date driven outcomes not just delivery time based.

Less time spent on the ceremony of planning / revising strategy. Our current process is overly complex and somewhat disconnected from the reality of our budgets.

Discovery right now is based on hunches not data that impacts the business; therefore much of the strategic direction is top-down vs. bottom-up.

Product managers need to do more discovery and share the results more often to foster a market centric decision making rather than a deal by deal, hipo or leadership decision making approach.

Get useful input from commercial teams instead of just the one thing they need for the next prospect.

Leadership should share company goals and Product managers should be responsible for bringing product goals and roadmap accordingly.

Product discovery is run, but at a leadership level. Direct access to internal and external customers is blocked. Information is scarce.

Creating capacity in teams time and roadmap for discovery led features.

We need more prototyping best practices to accelerate discovery. I see this becoming the norm and reducing discovery timelines.

It will ruin trust of produced artifacts because teams will not bother analyzing them. A lot of incompetency would be shadowed because everyone has access to knowledge. But increase in productivity is extremely positive.

Positive - more realistic user testing. Closing gaps between design and delivery. Negative - the floodgates of ai prototypes submitted by colleagues pitching their views rather than helping and building together.

In the short-term there is a negative impact of everyone’s head spinning trying to keep up. In the long term: It will change which PM software tools we use, how we think about our roadmaps, what we build, and the timeline to build.

Everyone thinks they are a product manager with copy paste from LLMs to show solutions.

Faster, more rigorous docs for our Product Lifecycle / SDLC process. Faster UI and data mocks. More consistent Issues creation and User stories.

I feel that a lot of companies lack the strategic moderation which gives room for team reflection. A lot of teams are experimenting with it, some are more effective than others to utilise it. It takes either a dedicated individual or leadership to conclude what that means for outcome and output generation. Those organisations that can critically reflect together and challenge the hype have a chance to achieve something great. But that is a skill the org needs to foster.

Most people have little or no understanding about the topic.. in particular the underlying mathematics and thus have difficulty in understanding, explaining and selecting appropriate models for a given task.

I'm on the fence, I can see there are huge benefits. I worry that if I don't level up quickly, I won't have a job in 2-3 years as it will be taken by either a super AI user or AI itself. I also find AI tooling clunky and spend more time reviewing and amending what it summarised as it has hallucinated. Plus the company is not fully onboard with AI tooling.

I still think caution is needed to avoid missetting customer expectations while testing with vibe coded prototypes (as opposed to low fidelity designs). I also don't want these prototypes to get in the way of collaboration and shared understanding within the product trio.

My role mostly requires creative and critical thinking, and extensive communications. Using AI tools to delegate those aspects is like for a pro-athlete to eat at McDonald's - counterproductive.

Those who rely on AI for discovery will end up with a cookie-cutter product.