Does anybody else love using the new year as an excuse to book a retreat in the woods and plan for the year ahead? I do it annually because it’s such an excellent way to get quiet, focus on what’s meaningful, and set a clear direction. It’s a critical time for leaders in particular because work and life are often blurred concepts with overlapping themes and opportunity areas. At least that’s what I’ve found as a product person turned operations consultant turned CEO.  

As you participate in your own reflection and planning exercises this month, I encourage you to think about what will be required to thrive as a modern product leader in 2025. This article shares my POV on three areas to watch, along with the hard and soft skills you’ll need to cultivate to excel in product leadership this year. 

Three Opportunity Areas for Product Leaders in 2025

I’ve seen more dramatic shifts in product management over the last 12 months than I have in the last five years. Obviously, AI was a huge factor, but before we get into the nuts and bolts of that it’s worth stating that the field’s core values are unchanged. This throughline for a product leader remains: You have the heartbeat of customer centricity and value orientation in your care. 

With that in mind, there are a few evolving aspects that will require product leaders to shift how they approach the work, including:

1. A Focus on Stakeholder Engagement 

The role of product leader has evolved to be less about day-to-day product mechanics and more about managing stakeholder expectations, demands, and priorities. It has always been a part of the role, but now it’s essentially a full-time job. It’s in part why we’re seeing more organizations stratify their product roles, with roadmapping pushed to the Product Manager level so that the Director level can manage stakeholders, set strategy, foster alignment, and navigate shifting priorities. 

As you think about 2025, there are a few skills you can dial up to improve stakeholder management and get more done (with less friction), including:

• Empathy: Hone your ability to drop into a different business division and foster a relationship, synthesize a problem or need, and quickly understand the needs of the person you’re talking to. This requires active listening, playback, and setting the ego aside. When you nail it, you can collaborate and get to win-win solutions more easily.

• Storytelling: Succeeding at stakeholder management requires an ability to tell a compelling story and bring people along with your way of thinking. Communicating and managing out and up will help you win others over. 

The more your organization matures in its product operating model, the more stakeholder management will be required. Start honing the skills now so you can evolve with the organization and be known for your ability to get stuff done, and keep stakeholders happy and teams productive (because you’re the one that can take down roadblocks and clear the path for their success).

2. More Balanced Talent Strategy 

Product roles are shifting, and that includes the expectations of the job. Working within so many product organizations has made one thing clear to me: Today, Product Managers need to have a balance of business acumen, technical acumen, and product management skills.

That means the leaders hiring product talent need to adjust talent strategies to consider this shift. My advice is to make sure your teams aren’t over-indexing for one area (otherwise you’ll lose fidelity of the other two).

To do this successfully, I encourage you to be aware of your own blind spots. Are you more comfortable hiring talent in one or two areas, but not all three? How will you identify the skills you need to hire, coach, and manage people with the acumen that you aren’t strong in?

Consider partnering with HR, finding mentors within the org, or working with an outside coach to build more knowledge around the business/technical/product management skills you aren’t as familiar with. 

For what it’s worth, this isn’t a weakness. We help leaders with this aspect of the job all the time. Dialing up your talent strategy isn’t just about attracting the right candidates—it’s also about getting the support you need to be a great leader to strong product people in the long run. 

3. Using AI to Support the Execution of Product Management 

AI has already had some major implications within product-led organizations, but I want to talk about two very specific dimensions here:

• AI’s impact on the product experience: This is probably the area you’ve already thought most about. How does AI impact your product portfolio? What do users actually want, and what role does AI have in delivering it? This is the technical context right now, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the mobile revolution. If you aren’t already activating here, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

• AI’s impact on how work gets done in your org: I’ve been fascinated watching some great product people use AI tools to support their jobs to be more creative, think in new dimensions, delegate, and so on. I truly believe that AI has the capacity to make product people even better. As a leader, it’s your job to empower your teams to use AI to do so. Not sure where to start? Look at your operational objectives for the year and ensure that each team objective or personal development plan has an AI piece aligned with it. For example, if the product objective is to “improve data-driven decision making around roadmapping,” layer in some test-and-learn capabilities via AI methods (in addition to the standard ways you’re working toward this objective). Get out of the team’s way and unleash them so they can explore different tools. 

 Product Leadership in 2025

As product people, we know better than most that evolving is the only way to stay competitive. So think of your own evolution as another way to keep the customer at the heart of your work. More empathetic, informed, and curious leaders foster better team cohesion and, ultimately, build better products. 

If you want a coach in your corner to help you cultivate key competencies, validate concerns and ideas, and feel more confident knowing that your efforts won’t be short-lived, give me a shout and we’ll chat.