Product Management Trends 2026 - Follow Up Story

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for paid subscribers to Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about the mid-year trends in product management:

Each June, I look back at my product management trends prediction from January.

The funny thing: each trend is moving and not moving at the same time. I’m doing product management tasks faster than ever due to:

• research and connecting product data with AI asisstance

• product context is up to date and less time spent looking things up

• more involved in go to market and customer feedback

But the collaborative parts of the job don’t speed up:

• cross functional teams often don’t have access to some of the product context

• leadership needs synthesis for investments, understanding constraints and accepting trade offs

• process is still aligned to Agile methodologies

There is a lot of learning across teams to adjust to the new approach.

The experiments are showing results. Now it is time to mainstream the advances in product management.

It is only a matter of time before seeing product benefits.