I am closing a quarter of writing about what is breaking in the product org with a piece about what is on the other side. Most predictions are vague enough that they cannot be wrong. I am trying to avoid that. Below are ten specific predictions for what product organizations look like in the first half of 2028, each precise enough to be checked. In July 2028, if this post is still on the site, I will write the retrospective.
The ten predictions
The median product team is six people, not twelve: a Product Builder lead, a second Builder or designer-Builder hybrid, three engineer-Builders, and a researcher covering two or three teams. Every product hire ships code in their first week, evaluated by a paid trial project, with whiteboard cases gone. Evals become the highest-status, highest-paid skill in product, the way growth PM was in 2018 and AI PM briefly was in 2024. Per-outcome pricing is mainstream but hybrid, a platform fee plus overage, for most enterprise software above $50K ACV. The roadmap becomes a public, real-time artifact, not a private planning document. The monolithic product function splits into three: Product Engineering, Quality and Economics, and Discovery and Strategy. The APM program is fully extinct at top companies, rebranded into Product Builder apprenticeships or wound down. CPO hiring shifts toward two new archetypes, the builder-CPO and the operator-CPO. Product Operations as a standalone function is mostly gone. And at least one well-known SaaS company above $500M ARR publicly stumbles on the transition to Service-as-Software.
What I am most and least confident in
The four I would bet real money on: teams get smaller and flatter, evals are the highest-status skill, hybrid pricing is mainstream, and APM programs as currently structured are gone. Each is either already happening at the leading edge or clearly forced by the underlying economics.
The two I am least sure of, and want to flag honestly: every product hire shipping code in week one might be too aggressive, because the cultural adjustment lags the tool curve, so the likelier 2028 state is a strong expectation for senior PMs and optional for junior ones. And the product function splitting into exactly three might be too structural; the specialization around evals and economics is real, but the grouping could be two functions or four.
What to do this year
The work is not waiting until 2027 to adapt. Hire one eval lead and give them senior status and a published scorecard. Run one Product Builder apprenticeship with two apprentices. Model one of your products at per-outcome pricing and see what it reveals. Cut your next product team's headcount target by 30 percent and see what happens. Publish your real roadmap, not the marketing one. Do one of these this quarter and you are ahead. Do three by year-end and you are in a different league than peers still running the 2022 playbook.