The future of Growth & Product Management in 2025

A summary, a youtube video and some fun, existential dread.

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The intersection of product management and growth is shifting dramatically:
Buyers expect different ways of working. AI changes the way we work and what we produce, and everybody is predicting that everything is dead.

And Product Managers do not know what to do with all this information.
I spoke about it at MTPCon in 2025 in my 25-minute keynote:

Here’s what matters now for leaders building scalable B2B SaaS businesses.

Three Non-Negotiable Skills for 2025

1. Outcome-Driven Roadmap Design
   Prioritize features based on customer economic outcomes, not vanity metrics. “Solving customer problems” is nice, but you need to learn how to solve customer problems that have commercial traction.

2. AI & GTM-Literacy
   It’s not about understanding how AI models work or that you suddenly become hyper technical, but you need to understand how opportunities shift based on:

   1. Your own (and your teams) increasing efficiency

   2. Why the market is getting flooded with more of what you considered to be unique to your product and why that changes how you plan for the future.

3. Stakeholder & Business Fluency
   Convert executive skepticism into advocacy through economic storytelling. Build "impact pre-mortems" showing revenue risks of inaction: learn how to build actual business cases before you waste time building another thing no one needed.
   Most opportunities are living cross functional. Maybe you shouldn’t build new features for the next 3 months, but focus on stability or improving the sales process because that’s where customers struggle. You can only know if you understand in detail how these functions operate.

Operational Shifts You Can’t Ignore

We love tables. Have one.

The Gary Problem Revisited

Sales-led (Gary) and product-led growth strategies now collide in messy middle markets. It makes it really hard to do and advocate for the product in an organization that focuses on making things right for Gary the Sales Guy vs. fixing glaring issues.

Product people commonly have this reflex to complain about it, but ultimately accept it as a reality.

Is there something we can do about it?

• Bridge the language gap: PMs must articulate feature impact across financial statements as well as they can. Even if that “just” means to tie it to the churn that the business is dealing with. You might not be able to measure everything, but if you cannot imagine and explain why something should have a material business impact… maybe you shouldn’t build it in the first place?

• Preempt feature creep: Implement "business case hygiene" for all requests and don’t get lost in eternal validation. The problem of business cases is often that they cannot have too much data because feedback from an MvP is missing at that stage. Endless customer interviews won’t solve that if you don’t know how to quantify any of it.

• Own the first impression: the majority of enterprise buyers now test-drive products before sales calls. You have to build your products for this new reality. Whenever a salesperson gets involved to explain the product, we lose customers.

The Math Behind Justifying Your Product & Growth Team’s Existence

Emerging Career Opportunities

While it’s hard to be a product manager right now, it’s also an incredible opportunity because we are the number one function in the company that has a chance of seeing cross-functional opportunities.

If I would structure my career plan in today’s market as a Senior PM i would focus on:

1. Become a Cross-Functional Translator

• Translate technical constraints into business risks

• Turn sales team insights into product opportunities by taking their feedback and forming a hypothesis, which I then validate quantitatively.

• Balance speed with compliance. Know when to play by the book and when to cut corners. Be uncomfortable. Insist to sit in on calls where you “don’t belong” normally.

2. Lead Through Uncertainty

• Prioritize smaller, faster experiments (think weeks, not quarters)

• Build "modular expertise" – deep in one area, conversational in others

• Plan for uncertainty by including in any suggestion you make that you need iterations. A growth funnel that is changed needs continuous improvements to reach its full potential. You might only know what to ship now for the next month, but you also know that what you learn from it will inform 6 - 12 months of stuff you don’t know yet.

The Bottom Line:

Success in 2025 demands economic traceability – every decision must connect to measurable customer and business value. The PMs who thrive will be those who can:

1. Speak the language of engineers, CFOs, and enterprise buyers. They sit with Sales and Customer Success constantly.

2. Balance AI capabilities with human judgment

3. Turn organizational friction into innovation fuel and opportunities.
   

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Sync your email and watch Attio build a powerful CRM - with every interaction you’ve ever had, totally enriched and organized.

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