PDMA Connections - March 2026

Join PDMA for a FREE webcast with Scott Burleson, Chief Product Officer at The AIM Institute.

Most teams don’t suffer from a lack of data. They suffer from a lack of clarity. Product roadmaps stall. Research gets debated instead of used. Strategy decks multiply, but confidence doesn’t. And AI promises speed—while quietly amplifying whatever confusion already exists. The root problem is almost always the same: poor inputs. When teams don’t share a clear, structured understanding of what customers are actually trying to accomplish, every downstream decision—prioritization, messaging, innovation, investment—gets noisier, slower, and riskier. In this webcast, we’ll explore the return on clarity: how improving the inputs to your product, marketing, and innovation decisions changes everything that follows.

The goal of this talk is to give realistic expectations about the potential of AI, its limitations, common misconceptions, significant risks that product teams and upper management need to be aware of, and major design issues for products. Upper management tends to overestimate what AI can do and underestimate its development and operating costs. This session will help product managers navigate the hype, better understand the underlying context that AI systems operate in, and make more responsible and effective product decisions.

This talk is based on Professor Hong’s and his colleagues’ research at Carnegie Mellon University, as well as courses taught there on UX Design and Responsible AI.

PDMA’s Global Student Innovation Challenge 2026 submission portal is now open and ready to receive your innovation ideas!

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is pleased to offer the 7th annual Global Student Innovation Challenge. This challenge encourages and supports students developing novel, real-world offerings—including products, software, or services. Students currently enrolled full-time at a university academic program, either in an undergraduate or graduate level, are eligible to participate. You can review the rules and guidelines of the challenge, as well as videos of the winning teams from previous years, on our website. Please thoroughly review the rubric to ensure you meet all the criteria.

The submission portal is now accepting applications with a deadline of June 1, 2026.

Recent kHUB Postings:

- Product teams often say they are customer-centric, yet still default to feature-led VOC. In this recent webcast From Pain Points to Product Success with Problem-Led Insight, Steve Hansen of Phase 5 and Shashwat Nath of Watts Water Technologies walk through how reframing the inquiry, surfacing “hidden in plain sight” product issues, and resisting internal bias led to a market-ready concept with strong organizational confidence behind it. Access the webcast here and learn:

Why problem-led, jobs-focused VOC outperforms traditional feature-first approaches―especially in mature categories
How structured, bias-resistant interviews uncover consequential failures customers rarely volunteer
Practical techniques to bypass internal assumptions and listen differently across diverse user groups
How to translate maintenance and reliability headaches into a focused, strategic product specification rather than a grab-bag of features
How problem-led insights can provide a clear roadmap from discovery to a differentiated, market-ready solution

- We have several new kHUB guest contributors that have recently submitted viewpoint blogs to our site. New PDMA Board of Directors member Keyuri Anand and Seattle Chapter leader Parul Jain share their insight on how product managers can use empathy in product development beyond simply understanding the customer in the post The Empathy Trap: Why Focusing only on Customers Holds your Product Back.

- In his recent kHUB post Stage-Gate®: The "Official" 2026 Version, guest contributor Dr. Robert Cooper shares the history, premise, development, key features, updates, and appropriate use of this time-honored NPD governance system. “Stage-Gate thus provides an integrated value-creation and governance system that translates high-potential ideas into well-validated, commercially successful products while systematically managing risk at every step. By embedding customer insight, disciplined decision-making, and adaptive, agile practices into a single end-to-end model, it remains the global benchmark for organizations seeking to improve innovation performance and return on R&D investment.”

- The kHUB curator team is reaching into our archives and highlighting some interesting, still relevant content.

The 2020 posting How the Landscape of Market Research is Changing Faster, Better Insights with AI by Kristyn Corrigan shows how machine learning and AI, when coupled with professional analysts, expedites the discovery of customer needs from user-generated content (UGC) and identifies “needle in the haystack” insights that are either infrequently mentioned or overlooked completely in more traditional qualitative research.
PDMA’s local Pittsburgh chapter presented Data Science for Product Management in 2021, discussing why product managers should care about data science and the related field of artificial intelligence.

kHUB Most Popular Content:

See what your competitors and peers have viewed in kHUB recently. The following content is among the most accessed last month:

Along with these still-popular classics:

We are excited to announce the launch of the 17th Annual PDMA Carolinas Student Innovation Competition. This is an exciting opportunity for the college students in the Carolinas to have their product development ideas evaluated by a panel of experts and win generous cash prizes.

See our website for details or contact Don Finucane at
dfinucan@charlotte.edu.

Key Dates:

Submission deadline: April 10, 2026

Presentation (virtual) April 24, 2026

Please note that students can participate in both PDMA Carolinas as well as PDMA’s Global Student Innovation Challenge, separately.