A survey of members and managers of product teams identifies multiple cultural and technology issues that collectively conspire to shake confidence.

A survey of 1,221 members and managers of product teams published this week finds that while most feel either empowered (52%) or somewhat empowered (33%), a full 84% are also very concerned (27%) or somewhat (57%) concerned the products they are developing will not succeed.

Conducted by Atlassian, the survey also finds only about half of respondents (52%) collaborate with engineers either at the beginning of the ideation (20%) or concept validation (32%) process.

The survey suggests that product teams are still anxious and not as well integrated as they should be due to a variety of cultural and technical challenges, says Tanguy Crusson, head of product for Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian. “They are not working that closely with engineers,” he adds.

For example, balancing multiple projects, competing priorities, and team capacity is identified as the top challenge product teams face (39%), followed closely by prioritizing which product features or initiatives to focus on (37%), developing a compelling and differentiated product strategy (36%), adapting to emerging technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) innovations (34%), gaining and synthesizing critical customer and user insight (33%), securing the necessary resources (32%), aligning diverse stakeholder expectations (31%) and demonstrating impact and results to senior leadership (29%).

While it’s generally anticipated that AI will play a role in helping product teams to address many of these issues, the survey makes it clear it’s still too early for AI to have had a major impact, notes Crusson. In fact, the survey finds that over half (52%) of respondents are using AI, with 77% identifying time savings gained by automating routine tasks as the primary benefit, compared to 52% that said AI is accelerating high impact tasks. On average, survey respondents said AI saves them two hours of labor per day.

However, nearly half (46%) noted that because of lack of integration they don’t see how AI fits into their existing workflows. Additionally, 45% said they don’t trust the accuracy and reliability of AI outputs, while a third (33%) are uncertain about tool usage and effectiveness.

On the plus side, a full 90% of respondents said they either lead or have equal influence in cross-team discussions. Only 15% feel limited ability to influence product strategy. A total of 90% also said they get to focus on work they love, collaborating across functional teams to turn ideas into reality (50%) to solving complex challenges through creative problem solving (47%). At the same time, nearly half (49%) also noted that internal politics limits collaboration, while 50% said they wish their organization did a better job of tracking contributions made between cross-functional teams.

In terms of areas survey respondents wish they had more time to focus on, nearly half cited strategic planning and roadmap development and data analysis and metric tracking each at 49%, followed by professional development and skill building (44%) and innovation and experimentation (42%). A total of 45% also noted their teams have become a lot more focused on profitability over the past three years.

Among the 60% of respondents that said their teams allow time for experimentation, only 31% said rapid experimentation and iteration is part of their early process.

More troubling, only 27% said their organization sets aside time to address technical debt that has been accumulated by previous projects. Just under a third (31%) only address it when that technical debt winds up blocking further innovation.

There’s no doubt Digital CxOs need to do a better job leading product teams. The issue, of course, is determining what to focus on first in the hopes of having the most impact.