Product teams today are under immense pressure to deliver faster, stay data-driven, align cross-functional goals, and scale processes seamlessly. But if we look under the hood, how are they doing?
We talked to 169 product team professionals at all levels - founders, directors and VPs, team leaders and managers, and product team members - to gain an insight into the challenges of product teams today and how alignment, or misalignment, is experienced differently depending on your position within the team.
The results are eye-opening.
A detailed picture has emerged of how product organizations succeed, and fail, with some expected (and many surprising) insights. Plus there’s analysis from industry figures on what the stats tell us about the state of the product operations industry in 2025, with tailored advice for both product leaders and product ops.
Here are three of the report’s key takeaways for what product team challenges are today.
1. Are you as customer-focused as you think?
30% of product teams say feedback always guides product iterations and strategy
52% say it happens only occasionally
16% admit that it rarely happens
Customers demand responsiveness and creating effective feedback loops is one of the top three directives of any product professional.
While both leaders and individual contributors are aware of the importance of integrating customer feedback into the product creation process, the reality is that the methods to do so are often deprioritized in favor of more tangible work.
...says Antonia Landi, product operations consultant and coach.
She suggests product leaders need to gain a better understanding of how their teams work, and whether there are opportunities to integrate feedback into existing mechanisms. Antonia adds:
If your customer feedback is scattered across tools, consider consolidating it into one single source of truth - but be wary of feature creep and buying fancy solutions that just turn out to be too complicated to keep up to date.
2. Who (and what’s) driving decisions?
Only 18% of strategic product management decisions are informed by market or user feedback
58% say that strategic decisions are made on leadership intuition rather than data
92% feel the loudest voice has more sway
According to Ken Thompson, Vice President of Products at Buildkite, how much of a problem this depends on how much experience the leader has and their ability to bring the rest of the business on the journey. He explains:
Sometimes data can help the rest of the business understand ‘why’… particularly if it seems counterintuitive. It might be right based on experience, but if you can't [bring the rest of the business along], that’s when it becomes problematic.
Antonia advises product leaders to show their thinking to product teams to ensure everybody is on the same page.
I’m not asking you to publicly justify every decision you make. But helping your teams understand how you came to your conclusions is a powerful alignment tool in your arsenal.
3. Is poor access and confidence in data sabotaging product teams?
Only 10% of respondents are “very confident” in the accuracy of their data for decisions
30% have low confidence
Ken believes the key takeaway here is to ensure that you have a data team.
Even businesses our size don't always have a dedicated team. Measure everything you can, whether it's product metrics to the cost structure of AWS, which we’re looking at now.
Antonia adds:
To understand where your organization is really at, try to measure the time it takes between a product manager articulating a data need and getting that need met. If it’s longer than two hours and relies on an external party, your organization is not yet set up to become truly data-driven.
This survey was designed to capture a real snapshot so teams can speak up about their experiences, identify blind spots, and start conversations about what needs to change.
For the full report, expert analysis and actionable insights, download the full report!
Emma-Lily Pendleton
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