How Product Management Will Soar to New Heights in 2025

It’s a new year, a great opportunity to pause to reflect and consider the potential for tomorrow. Last year was pretty tough for a lot of people. In the UK and USA, we suffered the pain of electing new government leaders. The economy was slow. Tech funding was slow. Companies put off projects and delayed buying decisions. There were more layoffs in companies of all sizes. Looking back, it feels like a year of risk reduction - yuck, that is not fun.

Sensational headlines or social media bubbles fed clicks a few times based on the idea that product management was dying. Multiple high-profile tech leaders scrutinized product management. Despite this, the fact remains the same: Tech is invested in solving real-world problems that people will encounter in a transaction to overcome. Someone has to decide which problems to solve and ensure the solution works for the customer! And no, GenAI cannot do this for you.

So, 2025 is here. I expect product management to become more critical in the changing tech scene than ever.

Uncertainty about how to harness GenAI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed that “SaaS is dead” and referred to business logic moving into the AI layer. Thanks to GenAI, this logic must no longer be tightly coupled to specific data stores and schemas. Through the agents' framework, the logic will become agnostic to the data. What does this mean for the large majority of SaaS products that trade on being a system of record or workflow tool?

GenAI has opened up non-deterministic workflows which could throw out our carefully crafted web forms and user journeys. In this “open world” application style, how do we know if what we are building is solving the real problems? How do we know if version 2 is better than version 1? Will it deliver good results 10% or 90% of the time? How do we differentiate our products, and how will customers trust they are getting value? So much stuff to figure out sits firmly inside the product scope.

OpenAI launched a $200 Pro subscription and has enjoyed a strong uptake. However, it is not making a profit running Pro because users consume too much AI. So, we have a commercial viability question routed deeply across GenAI: Can we profit from it?

As developers increase productivity using AI co-pilots and other technical roles start to figure it out, we have to ask what the ideal product manager co-pilot is. How can we embrace this technology to understand our customers better and make better decisions? Just asking an openAI ChatGPT what your customers want will not find the value proposition that will differentiate you from your competitor.

I can speculate what might happen, but the real fun in 2025 will be working all this stuff out!

Ethical Product Development

I suspect that AI ethics will become a much bigger topic as we progress through our AI journey. Concerns and a focus on data privacy are already on the rise, but as consumers recognise that AI is using their data more, we will have new problems to navigate. I am not talking just about copyright; I am talking about using data to make decisions that impact people. The governing laws are forming around this topic, but we have not yet seen them tested.

A straightforward example of AI not working as intended 100% of the time embarrasses the BBC and Apple. Over Christmas, Apple Intelligence summarised news articles, accidentally crafting a headline announcing the death of an individual, which was entirely false. For more information, read this BBC article. 

Sustainability will continue to be a concern impacting product decisions. AI's carbon footprint is significant. If product feature differentiation reduces, perhaps new differentiations will revolve around green credentials.

Emergence of specialised PM roles

Towards the end of 2024, the concept of an AI product manager became more popular. This is a technical product manager with a deep understanding of AI, and this role is commanding higher salaries. I suspect we will see more specialism within the product roles, coupling product more closely to the technology. Personally, I think it is a mistake if we blend architects and product managers together - we will only end up with a compromise and sub-optimal decisions. However, while the AI playbook is unclear, referring to the earlier challenges, this blended role will be needed to figure things out.

Increased focus on resilience

There will be fear as technology changes, such as GenAI, ripple through the markets and impact organisational design and product categories. Investment in product development that delivers a return must consider resilience to market, technological, and operational disruptions.

Enhance the use of analytics

With the new GenAI-powered analytical tools, we should see increased data decisions in both qualitative and quantitative data. I hope we can enjoy behavioural segmentation and real-time analytics so businesses can make more decisive decisions. GenAI can help make data accessible to everyone in the organisation.

2025 Tour

Before signing off, I want to share some news. I will tour UK Product Tank meetups starting January 15th in Exeter (UK). I will be doing a talk on the revolution of GenAI, giving away some books and recording some interviews for this newsletter.

I hope to see you in one of the following cities on the tour: Exeter, Bristol, Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff, Reading, London, Brighton, or Manchester.