This year, focus on new ways to deliver customer value.
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Put a relentless focus on customer-driven outcomes
To be successful in the ever-changing business environment of the tech world, chief product officers must be prepared to consistently reframe conversations — and resulting actions — toward customer value. In 2025, these leaders have an opportunity to do so by balancing interest in high-profile technologies like generative AI with addressing heightened concerns about security, or driving the creation and reuse of common platforms and components.
With new technology comes new security challenges, and chief product officers should be prepared to partner closely with stakeholders to create offerings designed to ward off new types of attacks and build confidence in new technologies to drive adoption. They must also consider how to best exploit common platforms and components.
Add value with AI, push platform engineering and mitigate security threats
Consider how these three trends will drive your priorities in 2025.
Trend No. 1: Deliver value from AI technology
With GenAI past the Peak of Inflated Expectations — though the hype continues — chief product officers are left to figure out how to deliver ROI from already significant investments in AI. Low adoption rates and meager returns on incorporating GenAI into their offerings mean that product leaders must shift gears to see positive outcomes.
Focus on where AI can add true value for customers and drive efficiencies in internal processes. Consider moving the focus away from GenAI adoption and onto other types of AI, like agentic AI.
Trend No. 2: Adopt common platforms and components
With increased adoption of as-a-service models, customer experience expectations and margin pressures, we see the rise of platform engineering approaches and of a new type of product manager, the digital product manager (DPM) role, tasked to support product managers and to identify, design and deploy solutions across the product portfolio.
Chief product officers must balance the benefits of common platforms with the demands of portfolio planning and design — another area where organizations are struggling to achieve the goals of their investments. Partner with internal technology and engineering stakeholders to identify and solve common requirements and develop capabilities across the platform.
Trend No. 3: Increase focus on new security threats
GenAI and other emerging technologies have created new attack surfaces and externally exposed APIs for product leaders to consider. Chief product officers and their teams must partner with engineering teams to assess and mitigate cybersecurity threats from users, endpoints, applications, data and networks.
In today’s landscape, security can no longer be an afterthought in the design process. Instead, product and security teams should work together to implement security-by-design principles that ensure security is front of mind during, and integrated into, the product design process.
How the 2025 trends will influence chief product officer priorities
To effectively respond to the 2025 trends, chief product officers must determine how to ensure returns from AI, consider the benefits and balance of common platforms and components, and ensure products are secure from today’s threats.
Learn more about those priorities and the actions chief product officers will take to achieve them in the 2025 Leadership Vision for Chief Product Officers eBook.
FAQ on 2025 trends for chief product officers
How can chief product officers be successful in 2025?
To be successful in the face of an ever-changing business environment, chief product officers must leverage their influence in the organization to reframe discussions around customer value. In 2025, this requires balancing interest in high-profile technologies like GenAI with addressing heightened concerns about security, or driving the creation and reuse of common platforms and components.
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