Framna | The state of product development 2026

When building is easy, product wins

Introduction

Digital products continue to increase in importance across all industries. For many companies, they are deeply business-critical. This gives product teams unprecedented influence and impact, while also placing them under growing pressure.

That pressure comes from multiple directions. Teams are expected to deliver high-quality products at speed, while navigating constant change, increasing technical complexity, regulatory demands, and rising user expectations. As a result, product work in 2026 is both more influential and more constrained than ever before.

Product teams respond to this pressure very differently — and performance varies widely as a result. To better understand the state of product work, we surveyed approximately 350 product professionals across industries and organizations of all sizes.

We asked how teams work together, how decisions are made, what they struggle with, where they see progress, and how they measure success. The result is a grounded view of product work as it is practiced in 2026.

A mixed but maturing picture

Overall, the survey points to rising product maturity. Across much of the sample, there is a visible shift — whether explicit or not — toward more product-oriented ways of working.

For example:

71% of respondents agree that products are built in cross-functional teams where product managers, designers, and engineers work closely together

64% report that product goals are well aligned with company-wide objectives

These practices reflect progress. Many approaches that were aspirational a decade ago now appear to be baseline expectations.

At the same time, the survey highlights persistent challenges:

The number one KPI teams struggle to improve is customer or user satisfaction

Technical debt, lack of clear vision, and cross-departmental collaboration are the most commonly reported constraints

This combination — improving practices alongside stubborn outcome challenges — suggests that maturity in structure does not automatically translate into maturity in results.

The product culture divide

One of the clearest patterns in the survey comes from how respondents describe the overall product culture within their organization.

The cultural distinction used in this report is based on responses to the question:
“How would you describe the overall product culture within your organization?”

Responses cluster into two broad groups. One cluster describes cultures that are primarily feature-driven, reactive, or sales- and revenue-driven. In this report, these are referred to as delivery-centric teams.

The other main cluster are those with either customer-centric, data-driven or experimentation-driven cultures. They are referred to as product-centric teams.

This distinction is not ideological. It is reflected in impact.

Across the survey, delivery-centric teams consistently show weaker signals in decision-making, discovery, measurement, innovation, and adaptation. Product-centric teams show stronger and more consistent signals in these same areas.

Both archetypes appear across industries and organizational sizes, often within the same organization. The difference is not talent or ambition, but how teams make decisions when priorities conflict and information is incomplete.

Throughout the report, we examine how these two cultural archetypes show up in practice — and how they shape outcomes over time.

AI in product work

The use of artificial intelligence in product work is already widespread. Only 3% of respondents report that they do not use AI at all.

At the same time, the survey reveals meaningful differences in how AI is used and what teams expect it to change. These differences closely mirror the cultural divide described above, with implications for decision-making, learning, and outcomes.

Responses span small companies, mid-sized organizations, and large enterprises, enabling comparison across scale. Participants also come from a broad set of industries.