Will 2026 Be ✅ or ⚠️?
- Justin Cullifer
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
By the time the calendar flipped to 2026, most product leaders already felt behind.
Not because they didn’t work hard in 2025, but because the ground moved faster than their assumptions.
AI is now in virtually every product conversation. According to a 2025 McKinsey Global Survey, nearly 88% of organizations report regular use of AI in at least one business function, up from 78% just a year ago, yet few have scaled AI deeply into workflows that deliver measurable outcomes.
Every vendor wants you to believe their tool solves everything, yet even widely hyped AI deployments face brutal reality. A different survey found that the percentage of companies abandoning most of their AI projects jumped from 17% to 42% in the last year alone!
The teams that will look back on 2026 as a win won’t be the ones who adopted the most AI; they’ll be the ones who asked the right questions first: What problem are we solving and how will we measure it? They treated AI like electricity: powerful, useful, and invisible when done right. Anything that didn’t clearly reduce friction or create leverage was dropped before it ate their focus.
That same discipline will show up in how money gets spent.
In 2025, product portfolios that once felt diversified began showing cracks. Across industries, only about 35% of tech projects are completed successfully, and only roughly 36% of organizations fully realize the benefits their projects were supposed to deliver. Does that sound familiar?
This means the majority of work teams start never pay full dividends. Beyond business goals, this is deeply demoralizing.
It's this low success rate that has spiked the quantity of "rescue" projects we, at APG, have undertaken on behalf of our clients over the years.
Going into 2026, the smartest leaders will invest narrower and deeper, demanding clearer outcomes and tying every dollar spent to measurable impact. This isn’t about less ambition; it’s about less noise and more signal.
Some of these decisions may sting.
There will be projects with history. Projects that once made sense. Teams people are proud of. Yet in 2026, successful leaders will learn that killing an initiative is not a failure; it’s a strategic choice. They will stop work that isn’t showing traction and free up resources for opportunities that do.
Many teams will also realize they’ve been listening to the same voices for too long.
Clients increasingly need specialized expertise and outcomes-oriented partners rather than general advice delivered by management consultant generalists. This is why diversifying consultants for fresh perspectives and testing delivery capability is critical. Different experts will spot blind spots that entrenched teams may overlook.
Finally, in 2026, the habit of questioning assumptions will separate winners from the rest.
Today’s best product leaders are already asking: Why this feature? Why now? Why this metric? Why this user segment? A lack of rigorous questioning leads to projects that consume tons of time and money without delivering measurable value.
So when people ask whether 2026 will be a checkmark ✅ or a warning sign ⚠️, the answer will be found in the sometimes difficult decisions that must be made:
Keep going or kill the struggling initiative?
Stick with the incumbents who produce more excuses than results, or try a new partner?
Embrace AI tactically or pretend its a fad?
2026 will reward teams that choose focus over frenzy, outcomes over output, and evidence over ego. For everyone else, it may feel like the year that slipped through their fingers.
The difference won’t be luck. It will be leadership.
