Software Product Management in 2023: Challenges, Trends, and Approaches

Product management evolves each year, and new best practices allow managers to win their target markets over with their products. Let’s explore what changed in how product management works and what it focuses on in 2023.

Monetization as a primary objective

In 2023, investors will be more impressed with concrete financial results than buzzwordy disruptive ideas. Previously, all you needed to do to get funded was to show that people would love your product. Usually, this was expressed in the number of users acquired in a short period of time.

Now, to get funded and recognized in the stock market, businesses need to shift focus from growing their user base to profiting from it.

This means that product managers need to build strategies around stable and scalable revenue streams and make sure their product is at least sustainable.

Focus on building processes and systems

Product management can quickly become chaotic just because there’s so much to pay attention to: from everchanging market trends and user feedback to unpredictabilities of product development.

The trend of 2023 is to get all processes in product management in place: this means having an algorithm for each process, like collecting user feedback. A product manager needs to determine how often they’ll run user testing, how they’ll react to their feedback, and integrate changes into the ongoing development process.

The processes should be powered by the appropriate ecosystem of tools for testing, planning, and communicating.

New user-centric approach

Everyone is preaching focus on users, but how many companies actually know for sure users like their products? Fewer than you expect. According to the Productboard survey, only 36% of businesses are sure that the product features and updates are consistently well-received by users.

Many companies lose focus on users by delving into technicalities too much. How does a product manager fight this?

Developing a user persona is a good starting point. A product manager can tailor the product specifically for them by creating a portrait of an ideal client. Even by focusing all the effort on catering to just one group of users, a business can increase user satisfaction and ensure it’s heading in the right direction with its updates, improvements, and new features.
Read more about product development trends of 2023