Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
The download on product management
Technology
February 23, 2023 – Product management functions have the potential to unlock the full value of software investments—but that’s not always the case, find senior partners Chandra Gnanasambandam and Jeremy Schneider and coauthors. After surveying 5,000 product managers from around the world who work on both internal and external software products in a range of industries, some 75 percent responded that product management best practices aren’t being adopted at their companies, that product management is a nascent function within their organization, or that it doesn’t exist at all.
To read the article, see “What separates top product managers from the rest of the pack,” January 20, 2023.
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Visual form
Horizontal stacked bar chart.
Layout / body structure
The chart lists industries from top to bottom and uses one 100-percent horizontal bar for each industry. Reader scans downward through industries while reading each bar from left to right across four maturity states.
What is being compared
It compares product managers’ views of the state of product management across industries, from social sector and global energy through tech and telecom.
Measurement system
The measure is percent of respondents, with each horizontal bar summing to 100 and segmented into four categories of product-management maturity or absence.
Visible structure inside the graphic
The bars start with a bright-blue segment for prominent product management with best practices, followed by two gray segments for weaker maturity states, and end with a dark segment for no product-management function. The bright-blue segment is visibly small in most rows and only modestly larger in tech and telecom.
Main takeaway from the visual
Across most industries, the combined gray and dark sections dominate the bars, showing that product management is usually underdeveloped, inconsistently practiced, or absent rather than fully mature.
Key standout values or extremes
The page headline states that at least three-quarters of surveyed product managers say their organizations’ functions are subpar or nonexistent. In the industry bars, only about a quarter of the width is bright blue at best, while the remaining three-quarters or more sits in the weaker or nonexistent categories.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a static chart image with no in-chart controls to operate.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart image is the full visual on this page.