The B2B Product Leadership Delusion?
It seems that B2B Product Managers live in a different world to the people who are leading them
Many of you who have been following my work for a while will be aware of my friend Saeed Khan, who was an early podcast guest of mine and then came on again. We’ve been collaborating on a few things over the last few years, including training courses and our survey “The State of B2B Product Management 2025”, which we ran over the Summer and Autumn.
We ran this survey to get to grips with what is really going on in B2B Product Management, and investigate ways we could help. We’re still analysing the data, but Saeed has written a great post about some of the key findings so far. You should read it: Initial Findings from the 2025 State of B2B Product Management Survey.
I’m not going to reproduce the whole article here. Still, I wanted to write some quick thoughts about one of the most interesting findings from the data so far: The massive disconnect between how B2B Product Leaders feel they’re doing and how B2B Individual Contributor Product Managers feel their leaders are doing.
We asked the question in two ways, depending on the respondent’s role. We asked leaders to rate how much they agree they do these things, and ICs to rate how much they agree that their leaders do these things:
Sets a clear vision and product strategy aligned with company goals
Aligns teams around shared goals and priorities
Enables effective prioritisation across teams and product areas
Fosters ownership, decision-making, and a customer-centric culture
Removes cross-functional blockers and advocates for the product org
Invests in people through mentorship, feedback, and career development
Saeed’s article goes into the data in more detail, but this meme sums up the key themes across all of the categories we tested:
TL;DR - Across the board, B2B Product Leaders think they’re doing pretty well in all of these areas, but B2B IC PMs are not convinced. The difference is stark, and they can’t both be right.
So What Gives?
From my personal perspective, there are three possible explanations:
B2B Product Leaders are doing a bad job, and they don’t know it
Product leadership is hard, and many of us have worked for companies as far from “product-led” as possible. There are sales-driven feature factories abound, companies are installing “industry expert” strategy people to lead product teams because they over-value subject-matter expertise, and maybe these people aren’t doing the job very well. Obviously, all leaders are constrained by their context, but it is very curious that, even if they’re not doing it very well, they still think they are.
B2B Product Leaders are doing a GOOD job, but they aren’t demonstrating it to their team
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around, does it really make a sound? B2B Product Leaders may well be doing the best job possible within their circumstances. Maybe they’re advocating for their product management team, pushing as hard as possible for product strategy and evidence-led decision making. Still, somehow they’re not showing their teams the results. Now, I might argue that communication and storytelling are essential parts of a product leader’s repertoire, but is it a messaging problem?
B2B IC Product Managers have unreasonable expectations, or don’t know what a good job looks like
Product leadership isn’t just “Product Management But More”, but a fundamentally different job from building products. You’re not building products anymore, you’re building product teams, product cultures and product portfolios. Even in good companies with good leaders, there’s often an “iceberg effect” where only some of the work someone does is visible, and you assume that they’re not doing anything else of any merit. Maybe B2B Product Leaders are doing the best they can in the context they’re in!
In reality, so far at least, we don’t have the data to really dig into the underlying, fundamental drivers of this disconnect. I do, however, find it fascinating and am curious to investigate more. My immediate general feelings are:
Product Leaders need to do a much better job of setting expectations within their teams and communicating with them openly and well.
IC Product Managers need to do a much better job of understanding the constraints of their business context and, indeed, the business they work for.
I’d be curious to hear your take!
We’ll be doing much more analysis of the data in due course and will shortly be releasing a free PDF report. If you would like to check the results so far, or sign up to get the report emailed to you when you’re done, do remember to check out Initial Findings from the 2025 State of B2B Product Management Survey, or just put your email address in here.
In the meantime, do feel free to reach out if you have any questions about how to improve Product Management in your organisation. I offer free fireside chats for teams, as well as paid workshops, coaching, assessments and fractional leadership. Hit me up for a call if you need me.
Important insights & synthesis, Jason.
There's a real opportunity here to make a difference.
And moving to a Product Operating Model goes in the right direction but may not be hitting the true source of the challenges.
Maybe the subjective nature of the survey questions is naturally biasing the results. I see this with competency frameworks all the time. Rather than asking how good someone thinks they (or their peers or leaders) are at something, it's better to ask behavioural questions that actually prove it or not. For example rather than asking how good someone is at defining product strategy aligned to company goals, ask when was the last time they communicated the company goals, or ran a strategy session, or communicated product strategy to the company or at least to relevant departments.